


Crossed Locks

by chestbones, FatalBlow



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Multi, all of them every single one, also it's queer as hell, and funny! a successful attempt at humour if i do say so myself, and it has big cat anthros in it because i moonlight as a furry, but! if you're looking for something new! it's at least well-written, they're all my ocs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25777048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chestbones/pseuds/chestbones, https://archiveofourown.org/users/FatalBlow/pseuds/FatalBlow
Summary: Fergus came to Stardew Valley for his father's inheritance with little more than the clothes on his back.  He expects to scrub his life clean and start anew at the ripe old age of almost-thirty, but he doesn't expect to have company in the old farmhouse where he once spent his childhood.CJ finds herself in Stardew after running out of options, leaving her down to the farmstead passed to her by her late mother--and Fergus's older sister--June.  She isn't happy to suddenly be sharing her life with what amounts to a complete stranger, but wants the life that the old farmstead has opened up to her far more than she hates the idea of living with estranged family.Family is as family does, though, and both Fergus and CJ are too bullheaded to make this transition an easy one as they navigate the personalities of each other and the many eccentric residents of Pelican Town.
Kudos: 2





	1. Ah Fuck Here We Go Again With Another Fic That I Hope I Don’t Abandon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like I said in the notes, this is just Stardew Valley but with mine and @skeletonguts' OCs. It's a fun and messy read with weird lovable characters and lots of good good found family. I'm not good at finishing fics like this though, so uh...yeah.

It’s a dump of a place and Fergus doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing here. Maybe it’s just escape: away from the job he hates, with the people he hates, in a city he hates, in an overpriced apartment with a girlfriend who hates him, all culminating in a life that he wants to scrub clean and start anew. He doesn’t know how to do that at the cusp of thirty, though.

Or more accurately he didn’t. Here’s starting to feel like the way.

Maybe he’s daunted by how hard he knows this is going to be. He’s standing in front of a cottage that’s been beset by nature, a final sentinel which gazes across acres of land that the forest has already begun to take back. And here’s he, fresh out of an office job and freelance art in a big city, barely with the taste of anything old and ancient on his tongue except for brief affairs on this very farm, old warm memories that he didn’t even realize he had until he stepped foot on the old dirt.

He supposes that makes sense. His father was the one who handed off the farm to him on his deathbed just two years back. He hadn’t bothered to come until now. He wishes he’d gotten a two year head start on this mess.

The last thing he is, however, is someone who backs down from a challenge. He throws down his bag—the remains of his belongings not in a moving truck somewhere—and begins to tackle the brush around the cottage so he can gain access.

By the end of it, thorns have made nasty work of his arms and he’s covered in a thin layer of sweat, but he’s in the house.

As he props himself on the doorframe and looks around, it’s not as bad as he feared. The house hadn’t been abandoned for too long, maybe only those two years he’d been away, and the inside was empty, dusty, but thankfully free of the forces that assault its exterior.

Most of all he notices the smell. Old, but intermixed with the fresh scents brought in from the outside. Like old wood and stained carpet and used blankets, all beneath a thick layer of dust.

Once he’s caught his breath, he opens windows and begins testing lights and looking in rooms. There’s nothing waiting for him here, though, nothing except an old trunk in the main bedroom. He wastes no time pulling out some of the keys he’d been left to try them on the two padlocks which hold it shut.

He manages to wrestle one off, but none of the keys fit the other. After going through them all again, he decides it’s a mystery for another day. It sucks. He’s part dying to know what his father left him, part anxious that he’d lost one of the keys even after carefully ensuring they were all on a keyring together. All he can do is keep exploring the house.

Surprisingly, there’s electricity and plumbing. It’s all self-powered, it seems, from solar panels and small wind turbines which he suspects need touch-ups to the nearby river upon which an old watermill turns endlessly.

There’s some furniture too. Bunk beds in guest rooms that he remembers sleeping on to the background chatter of siblings and cousins, old couches covered in old blankets that are scratchy to the touch, rickety tables covered in boardgames and decorations and kitchen supplies that look like they’d been pulled out of last century.

The cupboards are filled with mismatched bowls and plates, cutlery brought by visiting family and accidentally left behind, and even boxes of mac and cheese and cans of soup and beans. Adorning the walls are old pictures, some of family and a few completed puzzles with pieces numbering in the thousands, including one gorgeous wolf which sits above the headboard of the master bed, it’s black eyes boring a hole straight through him.

Most of the rooms are carpeted, and as he grimaces at the stains he figures he’ll be better off simply tearing it all up. Not all the windows are intact, but from the plastic which covers them he knows they aren’t recent developments. In every room is a nail from which hangs a fly swatter, many splattered with stains of unlucky bugs. There’s even an old radio, but the batteries are dead.

Once the house is swept out and well dusted, the interior could nearly pass for any old quaint little cottage on the market. He’s too exhausted from the work to admire it, though. He has a hot shower and goes to sleep in the master bedroom.

He awakens to unexpected sunlight streaming through the windows, the rumble of a truck outside, and a knock at the door. Groggy, he drags himself out of the bed to oversee the unpacking of the moving in a daze. As soon as he has a room full of boxes, he slumps back to his bed and goes back to sleep.

Next time he wakes up it’s to a brewing headache and a breeze that smells like rain. He peels himself out of bed to start some coffee, then stands outside to smoke and wait for it to finish.

He tries to imagine how the farm used to look, with several large plots and a couple dozen animals. He’s not sure if it’ll ever look like that again, much less if he’s going to be the one who makes it look like that again.

Somehow all this isn’t helping. He goes inside and eats something before he makes his mood worse.

Halfway through nursing a second cup of coffee and trying to psyche himself up to remove the rest of the vegetation from the house, he hears footsteps outside. He’s pretty sure only the mayor knows he moved in, and equally sure that she would have told him ahead of time if she was visiting.

He doesn’t go out to meet them, and thinks a lot about pretending he isn’t home when they walk up onto the porch.

Except they walk right inside. He jerks his head up at the young woman freezes at the door, a backpack slung carelessly across one shoulder, black curls equally as carelessly tied up in a floppy ribbon bow. She looks familiar, but he knows he’s never met her.

“Who the fuck are you?” they say, a little too much in unison for something unrehearsed.

“You’re the one who just walked unannounced into my home,” he grumbles around the lip of his mug. “So you answer first.”

She folds her arms and he knows she has an attitude before it comes spilling out her mouth. “Actually this is my house,” she says. “Well—it is now. It was for my mom from my grandfather, but now it’s mine.”

Before he can protest, she expertly whips out a wax sealed envelope—not so sealed anymore, but he recognizes the pretty purple wax. As she slaps it down on the table, he places his own on top of it. The authority drains out of her as she grabs it, confusion blatant the further she reads.

He grabs hers in turn. It’s not the exact same later addressed to him, it’s a different tone, but that’s because, as he finds out by the second sentence, it was addressed to his sister.

He slowly lowers the letter. Some things are falling into place.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re June’s kid, aren’t you?”

She blinks her bright black eyes at him. “Yeah. You knew my mom?”

“I’m her brother.”

Her eyebrows shoot right up. “Wha-hat? Seriously? How the fuck have I never heard of you?”

“Same reason I’ve never heard of you,” he says. “We didn’t get along.”

“Oh, well, good for you; she’s dead.”

The news hits him like a slap to the face, and he blinks stupidly at her. She doesn’t stick around to see it, hanging her bag haphazardly off one of the chairs and walking over to dig through the fridge.

“Hey, there’s nothing in here,” she says. She straightens and looks at the boxes. “Did you just move here?”

“Yesterday.”

“Huh.” She closes the fridge. “So why’d we both get letters saying this place is ours?”

He’s wary about bringing up some age old family drama to someone so young, especially when it involves her mother. Especially since he still knows that some of it is his fault.

“Your grandfather trying to play mediator from beyond the grave,” he settles for. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Guess so. So, what now?” She plops herself in the chair. “You kicking me out? Or we doing this?”

“The last thing I need is to be put in charge of a teenager,” he deadpans.

She wrinkles her nose. “I’m nineteen.”

That’s exactly three years older than he thought. He scoffs to save face and replies, “It’s in the name. But fine,” he adds as she opens her mouth to tell him off. “It’s not like this place is small.”

She sniffs indignantly. “Okay then.”

And then a rough silence falls between them. It’s too quiet, really, as it lets Fergus realize that he’s just agreed to live with someone whose name he doesn’t even know. Granted she’s his niece, but still.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“What? You don’t even know that?”

“I didn’t even know she had kids.”

“Jeez. It’s CJ. You?”

“Fergus,” he replies, swiftly adding, “And I don’t want to hear a single ‘uncle’ come out of your mouth.”

She rolls her eyes. “Sure thing, old man.”

He thought he squelched his kneejerk reaction to give her a death glare, but judging by her delighted snicker he figured not really. With a huff, he gets up, leaving his half-drank coffee on the table.

“Pick a room. I’m going to bed.”

“It’s one in the afternoon!”

“Did I stutter?” he retorts.

He slams and locks the door behind himself. He crawls under the blankets, but he spends a lot of time thinking and a lot less time sleeping.

He must have fallen asleep eventually, though, because he wakes up at some point. There’s no sun coming through the window, but he left it open and in return it left a growing puddle on the floor. Still half-asleep, he stumbles over and closes it.

When he steps out of the room, he’s hit by a wall of smell. Cooking, actually. There’s a plate of scrambled eggs on the table, still warm, and CJ is sitting on the floor going through his boxes.

“Oh good timing,” she says without looking up. “I made you eggs.”

“Are you going through my stuff?”

“Yeah and I can’t believe you didn’t bring anything to decorate with!” she exclaims. “Well, except two entire boxes of art. Is that all you do is draw all day?”

He stares at her, taken aback by her absurd confidence. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

She rolls her eyes at him. “You’re a pretty decent artist.”

“You went through my sketchbooks?!” he nearly explodes.

“Yeah, so?”

So he’s regretting letting her stay. But instead of saying anything and fueling the fire (he’s too damn tired for that) he starts grabbing boxes and moving them to his room, which he pointedly locks.

“Learn a little fucking privacy,” he growls.

“Jeez, it’s no big deal! You’re overreacting, Fergus.”

He wants to wring her fucking neck. Thank god Valerie never wanted kids.

After begrudgingly eating the eggs (he doesn’t know where she got them from and he doesn’t care to ask) he heads outside. It’s no longer raining, but the sky is thick and fluffy with kitten down clouds. In a dimmer light, the farm looks no less the monumental task. He’s got different regrets now. Maybe he’s too old to remake his life. Maybe he should go back to the city where he belongs.

But he’s got five hundred dollars to his name and absolutely no marketable skills. He tried to minimum wage thing. He got fired more times than he could count.

So that leaves the farm. He grinds the heels of his palms into his eyes and scrubs them hard, some vain hope that the mess will go away when he reopens them sitting in his gut. In theory, there’s nowhere to go but up. No one told him that up was the hardest direction to go.

“So I don’t know anything about farming,” CJ says from behind him. “Do you?”

Stifling a sigh, he begins pulling his black curls into a mess of a ponytail so he can steal a moment to think. In the end, though, he gestures vaguely to a patch of grass.

“I guess we cut and till that,” he says. “Then put seeds in it. Water it. Do plants come with instructions?”

“Iunno. Where do we get seeds?”

He’s looking around the farm now, like he might pull an answer out of his ass because he doesn’t want to spend his precious funds on seeds that he doesn’t know how to grow, when his eye catches the mailbox. The little red flag is up. He walks towards it, and CJ follows.

“Does the thing up mean there’s mail?” she asks. “I never understood that.”

“What are you? Three?” he snaps. “Of course it means there’s mail in there.”

“But what if you forget the mail in there and the next day the mail person thinks that the mail’s for them and takes it out and then we miss out on mail?”

“I’m not going to take the time to explain to you how stupid that is.”

He opens the box and lo and behold, it must have heard his prayers. He pulls out a box chock full of seeds—an assortment parsnip, cauliflower, potatoes, and green beans—and an accompanying letter. He passes off the box and tears open the envelope.

“’Welcome to Pelican Town,’” he reads, “’I heard that you’re from the city and starting with nothing, so I thought I’d send you some seeds from Estill’s. I grow vegetables in my garden, so I left a few tips as well. Make sure you come and say hi.’” He groaned with relief. “Thank god.”

“Yo, who’s it from?”

Cj all but tackles him to try to read over his shoulder. Or, more aptly, over his arm. How is someone related to him so damn tiny? Where had those genetics come from? Still, he instinctively pulls it out of reach.

“Lervaela,” he says, and hopes he’s saying it right because he’s never seen a name like that. “Says she’s from the ranch south of us.”

“Hell yeah, we’ve got to send her a thank you!”

“A thank you of what?” he says drily.

“Of words,” she retorts. “You know? Like a normal human being who has something nice done for them and says thank you with their human fucking words? You know the concept at all?”

“Remind me why I let you stay.”

She flicks her hair over her shoulder. “Technically I own half this place.”

He glares at her because he doesn’t have a response, then pointedly turns back to the letter to read through the tips (they were more like instructions but he isn’t complaining). CJ disappears inside, and by the time she’s back out he’s walked over to what appears to be an old lawnmower.

“Check the shed for gas,” he says after a few attempts to turn it on.

She can at least do that without smart remarks. He’s got low hopes for this lawnmower, though. It’s been left out in the rain for probably the entire two years this place has been abandoned and any bit of metal he can see is rusted by a combination of rain and a distant sea breeze. Still, he replaces the gas and rips the cord in vain. Finally, he lets go with a sigh of defeat.

“Great, so we use scythes?” CJ laughed. “There’s a push mower in the shed.”

He hates that idea. “Go grab it.”

He tries again at the mower while she does that. It sputters and wheezes loudly—loudly enough that he doesn’t notice someone approach. He spots the shadow on the ground and turns, expecting CJ.

Rather, he meets the pale eyes of a felic, her skin cloudy grey and softly merled, dressed in something practical and work friendly but not in something that hides her toned build.

She—his eyes flick to her ears, long and thickly furred, to make sure—lets her gaze wander from his worn jeans and holey sneakers to his equally beaten leather jacket, and finally to the poor broken mower. Her tail swishes once behind her, like in decision, and she speaks.

“I heard that this land’s owner was coming back,” she says. “As a farmer, then?”

He shoots the lawnmower a look. “For better or for worse.”

“It’s been left out to the elements quite a while,” she says, following his look, “but I think I can help with that. For a price.”

“Right, because I moved out here because I’m just bursting at the seams with cash.”

The remark doesn’t make her twitch even a muscle. “Your land’s worth a lot more than you think. Particularly the hardwood trees that grow here—they’re not easy to find, and expensive to import. I’m the town’s carpenter, so if you trade me your hardwood, I’m more than willing to give you easy prices on repair work and building jobs or, in this case, lawnmower that is a little more metal than rust.”

“Hey, who’s this?” CJ bounces over before he can reply. “Hi, I’m CJ! We’re new!”

The felic turns to CJ and addresses her just a touch more warmly than Fergus. “My name’s Petrisse. My family and I live in the mountains along this path,” she gestures towards the backwoods she must have emerged from beside the river, “are you his daughter?”

“Perish the thought!” she says cheerfully. “We just live together. It’s nice to meet you!”

“Petrisse is offering discount prices in exchange for our hardwood,” Fergus interjects. “It sounds good to me, but you own half the damn farm so…”

“I mean sure.”

“She says she’ll get us a new lawnmower.”

“Oh hell yes then! That’s awesome, I didn’t want to watch you mow everything anyways.”

He doesn’t know why he’s annoyed. It wasn’t like he was planning to let someone as tiny and spaghetti armed as CJ do the mowing. She wouldn’t make it five damn minutes.

“I’m Fergus, by the way,” he says to Petrisse. “Thank you for this. It’s going to make our lives a helluva lot easier.”

“And mine too, trust me,” she replies, dipping her head a little in thanks. “I’ll see you around, Fergus, CJ. Someone will bring the new lawnmower tomorrow.”

She leaves, and even though she was smaller than CJ, he gets the distinct feeling that she could have pinned him to the ground and ripped out his throat. He subconsciously reaches up and rubs his neck, unable to take his mind off of how he might like that a lot more than he wants or ever even should.

It’s CJ’s voice that pulls him away from thinking about hot breath and sharp fangs.

“Looks like we don’t have to work until tomorrow!” she announces.

She turns to march back to the house, but he yanks her back by the top collar of her jacket. “Cute. Go see if there’s gloves in the shed and we’ll start getting rid of the junk around the house.”

They worked for the better part of the day, filling up wheelbarrows of weeds and vegetation and fallen branches and trucking them off to where Fergus recalls the compost heap being. City life shows, though, for both of them. It’s two or three in the afternoon when they crash on the porch, stripped down to as few layers as they can manage in hopes of chilling their overworked bodies in the breeze.

“This sucks!” CJ says, the first thing she’s had the energy to say in quite a while.

“It’s farming,” he grumbles. “What do you expect?”

He’s willing to call it a day, though. Once his limbs feel a bit less like jelly, he heaves himself into a sitting position, wincing at how limp his curls look as they curtain his face. He pulls them into a hasty bun, like that’ll help.

“We got company,” CJ says.

Sure enough, there’s an old truck bumping up the dirt road towards them. It’s the biggest damn truck he’s ever seen, but why shouldn’t they be common in a place like Stardew? His own vehicle had been here all of two days and already lost her shine. He wished he had the energy to clean her up. Or the belief that it mattered.

He’s a lot less concerned with the truck and a lot more concerned with its occupant, however, when the massive head of a lion emerges.

“Oh fuck I didn’t know kiil’rah lived here,” CJ hisses beneath her breath.

Hell, he hadn’t known kiil’rah even lived in this country.

“Mr. Demir, I’m Virinii,” the lion introduces himself as he approaches. “I’m the mayor of Pelican Town.”

He scrambles to his feet and quickly scans the lion, noting the dark mane adorned with all variety of braids and trinkets. “Hello, sir—”

“Ma’am,” she interjects.

Dammit, he’d gotten the felic right but not the kiil’rah? “—Ma’am, is there something I can help you with?”

She inclines her head, briefly sweeping her amber eyes across the house and then the rest of their mess of a land. “It looks like you’re off to a good start. I didn’t expect two of you, but I suppose you’ll need the help if you want something functional by summer.”

“Yeah, I’m CJ!” she pipes up from the porch. “Nice to meet’cha.”

Virinii nods briefly, but she seems more concerned with Fergus. “I want to show you around town. Come with me.”

He climbs in the front with Virinii while CJ opts for the back (thank god, he doesn’t want her crammed in the cab with him and a freaking lion). Rather than heading in the direction of the town, though, Virinii takes an overgrown road along the river, forcing her battered vehicle to take every rock and every hole as they head on south. Better her vehicle than his, he thinks.

They soon leave the confines of their farmland behind and the road smooths out before opening up into a vast open space, split into parts by a winding river. At the very far end, just teasing the edges of his vision, he can see a line of trees which Virinii tells him is Cindersap Forest. To his right, he spots a large pond, and a figure standing nearby observing a handful of sheep and cows as they drank from it.

It’s another kiil’rah, Fergus realizes as Virinii pulls up. This one is much smaller and bulkier than Virinii, sporting no mane but long curls of thick fur which hangs from the arms and the tail.

“This is Lervaela,” Virinii says as she climbs out. “She owns the ranch here.”

Lost in his confusion about kiil’rah sexes, he nearly misses Lervaela’s warm greeting: “Mr. Demir, welcome to the valley,” she purrs. “I trust my package made it to you?”

“It did, thanks,” he says, swallowing the urge to get on his knees and thank her for writing those instructions like a toddler was reading. He settles for: “Those tips are going to be really helpful.”

Her eyes gleam, and he knows that she understands what he’s getting at. “I’ll see what seeds I have lying around come summertime, then, if you’re interested.”

“I won’t say no.”

At least Lervaela is much easier to take in. Unlike Virinii, who is ice cold in demeanour and much taller than him, Lervaela is at least eye level and speaks with a level of familiarity that makes him relax a little more.

By now, CJ has hurled herself out of the truck. “Hey, thanks so much for those seeds! I’m CJ, nice to meet you!”

At the sight of CJ, Lervaela’s ears swivel forward in what Fergus is sure is possibly interest, or even delight. “Hello, hello, I didn’t realize Mr. Demir had companionship. Here I was worried he would be up there all alone.”

“That’s funny cus he didn’t think so either. It’s a long story,” she adds, waving away Lervaela’s curious look. “Hey, do you have chickens?”

Fergus checks out of the conversation and looks around. Beyond the pond, the forest starts up again, with a dark path leading to the thickest parts of it. A sudden wild desire to explore hits him so hard it leaves him just about breathless.

While he’s looking down the path, a pale figure emerges. All the hairs on his nape and arms stand on end, until he realizes it’s just another kiil’rah, looking like a taller, slimmer, scruffier version of Lervaela. She briefly glances his way, then heads towards the animals, followed by a couple of eager hounds.

“That’s my daughter, Rivah,” Virinii remarks. “She works on the ranch with Lervaela.”

“Ferro and Dulcie also help out from time to time,” Lervaela breaks conversation with CJ to add. “I’m sure you’ll meet them eventually.”

“Eventually,” Virinii agrees. “I’m taking you into town now.”

Without waiting for a reply, she gets back into the truck. Fergus waves goodbye to Lervaela, and ushers CJ into the back so they can head into town.

“If you’re low on money, there’s plenty to forage in Cindersap,” Virinii says as they drive along the river. “And if you fish, the river and pond are full. Lervaela won’t mind you taking, or even selling, what you find there.”

“What about if we need wood? Can we take the trees?” CJ yells from the back.

“You have plenty of forest on your land.”

“Not hearing a no,” Cj murmurs. If Virinii heard it, she doesn’t comment on it.

Town is marked by a couple of riverside homes and a cobble pathway that’s clearly made more for walking than it is for driving, but that doesn’t stop Virinii and it doesn’t even hinder her beast of a truck. She pulls up beside a larger house, complete with flower boxes in the front that have been worked recently, with no trouble at all.

“My home,” she says as she gets out.

Fergus and CJ follow her out and are greeted by a picturesque snapshot of the town. Virinii’s home sits on a raised area where the river forks, overlooking a modest town square where he can see a clinic, a store simply labeled “Estill’s,” and a bar called the Stardrop Saloon. There it branches off to the riverside homes they’d initially passed in the south, another home in northeast, and a trailer home right at the river’s edge.

Beneath the cliff which borders the northern parts of the town and the river to the east and south, the town feels quaint and contained, claustrophobic even. Before those thoughts can get to him, though, Virinii brushes past him, saying something or another as she leads them down to the village square.

On the way, they pass a small man who isn’t as human as Fergus thinks at first glance. When he stretches his arms over his head, large bat-like wings unfurl as well. Unconcerned, he gives them a friendly nod as they pass.

“Am I missing something? The city isn’t nearly as colourful as this place,” he hisses to CJ.

She gives him a blank look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Fergus.”

“You’re fucking with me right now, right?”

She frowns and shrugs. He scowls. She has to be fucking with him.

“This is the saloon,” Virinni says, stopping first at the brown bricked building. “Jean and Oann run it from twelve to twelve. Best place to meet everyone.”

As she walks away, CJ fist pumps. “Yes! Old enough to go in!”

“Barely,” Fergus mutters.

Virinii takes them to the clinic next. “Maxwell is our doctor. I recommend introducing yourself and setting a date for annual checkups.”

He grimaces at the blue and white building as Virinii takes them right next door to the beige walls of Estill’s General Store. Beside the door and under an overhang is a bulletin board with a laminated calendar and plenty of space for notes and job listings.

“Estill and Miser work the shop,” she says. “And Butch lives here as well. This is the best place to get seeds.”

She says the last part while glaring in the direction of the bridge. Since she’s taking them in that direction, he figures he’s about to figure out why.

And sure enough, as they cross the fine stone bridge, a Joja Mart looms in front of them. A well of bitter disappointment wells in his chest. He’s had all too many jobs in Joja’s various branches, and not a single one treated him like a human being. A part of him hoped to escape this particular smudge on his life.

Obviously Virinii agrees, as her ears are flat to her head. “And if you feel like throwing your money where it won’t come back to you? Shop here.”

She swiftly heads back south, passing a large, freshly built home with a lash of her tail and moving on to a building surrounded by concrete. Fergus wishes he could say that he expected the lion leaning against the door and smoking. Just how many kiil’rah lived here?

Though judging from his dark brown pelage and luxuriously curled mane and fur, he figures this is Lervaela’s and Virinii’s son, probably from the same litter as Rivah.

And sure enough: “This is my son, Edric. He’s our blacksmith, and can provide you with any number of tools you might need.”

Fergus doesn’t like the way that Edric licks his lips and looks directly at him. “Nice meeting you, farmer. Nine to four, every day. Make sure you come say hi.”

“It’s Fergus,” he says flatly. “And I’m sure I’ll have to eventually, won’t I?”

As they move on to the much larger building neighbouring the blacksmith, he says to CJ: “Where was your manic introduction?”

She glances at Virinii to make sure she was out of earshot. “Dude’s totally slimy.”

He snorts. “Glad we agree.”

“This is the library and museum,” Virinii says as they catch up. “If you need to research anything for your farm, I recommend coming here first. My youngest son, Allerick, will help you find anything you need.”

Finally, she took them across another bridge and back to her truck. First, she gestures towards a third bridge in the south. “That path leads to the beach. Our fishermen live down there, as well as Annemieke.” Then she nods towards the wooden stairs which lead up the northern cliffs. “And that path leads into the mountains, where you can find more resources, ores especially.”

She pauses, ears flattening. “There’s a family of felic in the mountains,” she adds. “I would recommend avoiding them. Petrisse may provide a lot to the community, but she isn’t to be trusted.”

Behind her back, Fergus and CJ exchange anxious looks.

Afterwards, Virinii takes them home and Fergus is reminded all over again of his aches and pains…and to think, it isn’t even five. He does wish that they’d grabbed something to eat from the saloon, though, budget be damned.

The moment Virinii drives off, CJ pipes up: “So she doesn’t like the felic, huh?”

“What gave that away?” Fergus says dryly.

“C’mon, it’s funny!” He raises an eyebrow at her. “Cats and dogs? And they hate each other? God, you’re no fun.”

“I don’t see what’s so doggish about the felic. They’re literally called felic. Like feline?”

“You’re just stupid.”

“CJ I am going to shave my head and strangle you to death with my own hair in a manic fit if you don’t shut up.” He rubs his eyes. “Here’s hoping there’s nothing to her claims considering we already made that deal with Petrisse.”

CJ shrugs. “Pfft, she’s old. Probably just being racist.”

“Probably.”

After a pitiful dinner of canned beans and eggs (he’s realizing now that he has no idea where CJ got the eggs, and he doesn’t care to ask), they agree to call it a night.


	2. Town Introductions Part One of Many We Have a Lot of Characters Okay Leave Us Alone

Light streams through the kitchens windows and even though Fergus thought he did a good enough job of dusting, particles nonetheless hang in the air like glittering snow. It makes his nose itch, and CJ’s been sneezing all morning. No luck getting the windows open, though. As he nurses his coffee, he fantasizes about having the damn things replaced with something that can, well, actually open.

While he pours himself a second cup of coffee, he asks, “Okay, so correct me if I’m wrong, but kiil’rah men have manes and women don’t right?”

“If this is about Virinii, she’s obviously trans.”

“I’m not stupid,” he retorts. “I knew one of them was trans I just needed to figure out who before I go bungling anymore pronouns.”

CJ turns so her arm is hanging over the back of the chair, giving him the full brunt of her contemptuous glare. “And you didn’t figure it out after seeing Edric and his big dumbass mane? Next you’ll need me to explain to you about the felic.”

He sneers at her. “I got Petrisse right, didn’t I?”

“Wow, look at you! You had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right and you nailed it, old man! Pat yourself on the back!”

“Oh I’m sorry; not everyone can be apparent fucking experts of a different species’ sexes!”

“No one’s asking you to be a fucking expert! I just can’t believe you can’t remember that boys usually have manes and girls usually don’t, but apparently it’s like rocket science to you!”

A loud knock interrupts what could have been a very long and increasingly stupid argument. Shooting one last look at CJ, Fergus answers the door.

This felic looks entirely different from Petrisse. He’s bigger, but that just means a little more muscle has been packed into what is still a comparatively slim frame; one that this felic is not afraid to show off, as his vest hangs open with no shirt beneath it. In the day his black skin and hair seem to steal all the daylight around him. In the night, Fergus suspects his gleaming odd coloured eyes are about the only thing visible.

And this is the second non-human that’s looked him head to toe and licked his lips at him. Fergus doesn’t mind the attention of a much smaller felic compared to the much larger kiil’rah, though.

“Hey, name’s Roy.” Roy spins one of his own black curls around an idle claw. “Riss told me you’re needin’ a lawnmower, huh?”

“We do. I’m Fergus. The pest that’s about to interrupt us is CJ.”

“I can introduce myself!” CJ exclaims, bursting between the two of them with fiery indignation.

Fergus brushes past the both of them, balling his hair into the quickest bun he can manage. “Let’s look at what we’ve got.”

“Well I’ll admit it ain’t nothing fancy,” Roy says as he trots after him. “And she can’t take your long grass, you’ll need to shorten that and we ain’t got a weedwhacker so I brought down a couple’a scythes in case you don’t have ‘em.”

“I don’t need fancy I just need working,” Fergus sighs.

“A man of practicality, I like it.”

Roy shoots him a grin and leads him over to the lawnmower which, yeah, it really isn’t anything special, but it’s more metal than rust and Fergus is learning that country luxury and city luxury are far from comparable.

Fergus lets CJ take the scythes so he can push the lawnmower over to the house and hopefully take a more thorough look at it before getting down to the monumental task of mowing. He expects Roy to leave. Instead, the felic follows along, seeming to grasp at excuses to stick around a little longer.

“So you’re gonna be our farmer, huh?” he says. “Heard you’re from the city. Can’t say I know what someone from the city knows about farming or any sorta country life but I’ve been here my whole life, y’know, walked that walk more ‘an it needs to be walked so I think I could stand to show you a thing or two, if you’re game?”

He’s loathe to accept help, but CJ on the other hand… “Like what?” she says.

Roy shoots her a look, but most of his attention stays on Fergus as he continues: “The basics an’ all that. You got a tilling machine or you stuck using hoes? You know which plants for which seasons? How to break up rocks? You even been shown around, yet, cus I can give you the grand old tour granted Virinii doesn’t stick her damn nose into any o’ it.”

“I heard she’s not too fond of you,” Fergus says.

Roy shrugs. “Old bitch needed someone to hate an’ for a while it was us. These days she’s looking more an’ more at Joja and I can’t say I’m complaining. Seriously, though, I know everyone in town and a lot of people not in town. I’ll take you to the saloon later, what about it?”

“Actually, tell me how the hell to till.”

Roy falters, like he didn’t expect that response. He regains a bounce to his step in a half second, though, motioning for Fergus to follow him towards the shed.

“Well your life’ll be pretty damn easy if you got a tilling machine,” he says. “Prolly won’t have one’a those gas powered ones, good ol’ sweat and muscle kinda deal, but beats the hell outta throwing out your back out using a hoe to get it all spic an’ span.”

They indeed have a tilling machine, but the shed has a hole in the roof that he hadn’t thought much of until now. As if fate had a personal vendetta against his attempts of farm life, she had placed not just the tilling machine but the three viable hoes as well beneath it. The rain had made fine work of them.

CJ grimaces at the rusty murder scene laid out before them. “Well…I bet Edric has hoes.” She then laughs and playfully elbows Fergus. “I bet he’ll give you a couple for free if you do him a favour.”

“Hey now let’s not be too hasty!” Roy butts in. “Old girl might be salvageable!”

He crouches beside the old machine, tapping his claws on it as he looks it over. Fergus folds his arms and watches. He’s mostly humouring him, though. He has no doubt that he might just have to go to Edric and do exactly what CJ was implying—or in the very least, cut some sort of deal with him.

“I don’t think it’s too far gone,” Roy says after a moment. “A little WD-40 here, a little rust removal there, and we’ll get this puppy rip, roarin’, an’ polished ‘fore you can bat a single one’a those pretty little eyelashes o’ yours.”

Fergus arches a brow. “If you know where to get WD-40 and rust removal for free then sure, I’m all ears.”

“Uhh, well…” Roy raps his claws a little faster on the metal, worrying his lip as he thinks. “Well I don’t mind making it a little project of mine. A little ‘welcome to the neighbourhood’ sorta gift, whattaya think? Might take a little bit but I can fix this baby up for you and have you working the fields in no time, how ‘bout it?”

“Oh fuck yeah, that’d be awesome!” CJ seems to have a knack for knowing when he plans to say no. “Thanks so much, Roy.”

“We’ll still need hoes in the meantime, so I’m going to go see Edric,” Fergus says. CJ stomps on his foot, and he adds, “And yes, thank you for fixing the machine. It’ll make life a helluva lot easier.”

Roy stands up. “You’re damn right. I’m gonna get this puppy back home, then, and by the way? That offer to take you ‘round and do some introductions? Wide open. First night you got free and we’ll do it.”

He stifles a sigh. “Alright. Might be a bit while we’re settling in, but I’ll…think about it.”

Fortunately that seems to be enough for Roy. “You got it, chief. Good luck with Edric. That smarmy fuck will eat a pretty thing like you right up, if you catch my drift.”

He’s insulted that both Roy and CJ have already decided what’s going to go down with Edric. It seems like a challenge, though, and he’s never been one to back down from a challenge.

“Alright, if I’m dealing with Edric then that grass better be cut when I get back,” Fergus says to CJ as they leave the shed. She curls her lip at him and he adds: “Look, unless you want to go talk to him, this is how the labour’s getting split. I’d love to let you have a go at him, but I doubt you want to do that.”

“Yeah, fine,” she grumbles. “I don’t know how to use a scythe.”

“Then you better holler for Roy before he gets too far.”

Thought not entirely sure that she would do what he wanted, Fergus grabbed his bike and headed into town.

On the dirt road which passes the bus stop (and an old neglected bus) it takes only about five minutes to get to town. Vastly different from the city, where stubbornly insisting on using his bike to get to work (squeezing between cars in traffic jams) still took him over twenty minutes. This is much more refreshing, and a lot less smoggy.

But obviously Pelican Town isn’t used to seeing motorcycles. The town square is a little more populated than he expects (he thought small towns were supposed to be quiet) but there’s plenty of faces to watch him peel through the square. He can’t ignore them anymore than he can ignore the way his bike bumps haphazardly along the cobble. A sudden, intense longing for city brand anonymity grips him as he rides over the bridge and over to Edric’s shop.

Fortunately, it looks like he’s the only customer. He doesn’t want to contend with some townsfolk trying to introduce themself and probably weasel away the itty bitty personals about himself and his life that he keeps held to his chest. Anything to make them the center of the next hot gossip.

At least that doesn’t change from city to town. Everyone wants secrets to dole out like candy to children.

Not letting himself a moment to think about it, he steps into the shop. Here, it’s sweltering. Edric is bent over his anvil, steadily hammering something into shape, his counter unmanned. Fergus would think that the noise would drown out his footsteps, but Edric holds up a finger the moment he steps inside. He goes to wait by the counter.

He doesn’t wait long. Edric plunges the metal he’s working on into a vat of water, sending a plume of steam into the air and driving up the humidity in the shop. He can’t imagine the kiil’rah is comfortable. He’s thickfurred like Lervaela, penny-shade curls tumbling off his head, neck, and arms and sweeping half-down the length of his tail like a curtain.

He’s never thought of a kiil as handsome, but he begrudgingly admits that Edric is probably that, and probably not just to him, either. Especially as he pulls away his mask and fixes him with spring blue eyes.

“Fergus, was it?” Edric says. His voice rumbles deep in his chest, even deeper than Virinii’s.

“Mmhm.”

He lays his mask on the counter and gives it a cursory dusting with a massive paw. “Seeing you sooner than I thought. How can I help you?”

“I just need a couple of hoes. I’m strapped for cash, though. Think we can come to an agreement?”

Edric’s eyes flash, and Fergus raises a finger. “Before you say a fucking word: see this?” He mimes holding a pin. “This is sexual favours. We’re putting this sucker over here, in the wall, off the table, until I’ve share more than a half a conversation with you.”

In return, Edric chuckles. Fergus instinctively steps away when he circles the counter, but it’s his only show of hesitation as he squares his shoulders.

“What do you think I take you for, Fergus? A new in-town conquest, hm?”

Edric drums his claws across the wooden counter, takes him from head to toe. Then, quick as a flash, he has Fergus backed against the wall. He hasn’t laid a claw on him, but Fergus can feel his breath across his face. He reaches for the wood beside his head, and mimes pulling out that invisible pin to hold between their faces.

“Most kiil like a hunt,” he says, pretending to study the pin. “A good enough hunt is a religious experience, and a tease like you just whets the appetite. But…”

He puts the “pin” back in the wall and walks away, flicking Fergus with the tip of his tail. “There’s no fun in trade or blackmail, if that’s what you’re suggesting. It’s like killing something helpless at your feet, no jolt of first-scent, no thrill of the chase, no blood on my tongue. So keep your pin in the wall—I’d rather you pull it out willingly.”

Turning to look over his shoulder, he licks his lips. “And you will pull it out.”

“…You done your fucking monologue?” Fergus growls.

“Quite, and ready to barter. I have something in mind.” He returns behind the counter and roots around underneath it for a second. “Are you a fisher, Fergus? Or does city life train that out of you?”

“I’ve never fished in my life. I’m not exactly the patient type.”

“Well I have good news for you.” He comes up with a pen and paper, scribbling a short list in surprisingly neat handwriting. “Fishing in Pelican Town is nothing like fishing in cityside rivers and lakes. You’ll see a little more action—enough to keep you entertained, I hope.”

“Okay, and where am I supposed to get a fishing rod?”

“Oh I’m sure Tam and Josan will set you up, free of charge.” He finishes the list and slides it over. “I’m fond of catfish, but our fishermen are staunch ocean goers, and sure as hell not going to fish in the rain for my tastes. Ordering is expensive, and I like their meat wild, not farmed anyways. I have a few other fish you can find in this area on that list, though. I’ll take those as well.”

Fergus eyes him suspiciously as he pulls the paper over. “Right, and when do we call it even?”

“I make these hoes myself, so you must understand that they’re quite expensive. They will outlive you, though, so you won’t expect to ever invest again. A hundred dollars for each, two hundred for two, and I have listed the going price for those fish. As you can see, a quality catfish will more than pay for your equipment—I’ll owe you.”

That doesn’t sound like as bad a deal as he feared. He folds the paper and tucks it into his pocket. “Sounds good to me.”

“Perfect.” He disappears into the backroom, and re-emerges with two well-made hoes. “Pleasure doing business with you, Fergus. Come by my shop soon.”

He leaves faster than he wishes he had, a whole new list of regrets about moving to this town tacking on to the end of the one he’s already been filling out. Sure, it could have gone worse, but it also could never have happened in the first place.

But truthfully, this is the most excitement he’s had in ages. He hated facing down Edric but simultaneously there’d been a thrill while doing so. A thrill he’d never gotten crammed into a too-small city apartment, almost never leaving besides for work. Who knew he could have gotten it in a place like this.

Deciding he’d rather make both trips at once, no matter how much he didn’t want to talk to strangers, he slides up to the bridge which leads south towards the beach. No way his bike is getting down a rocky path like that.

With a resigned sigh, he leaves the vehicle where it is and starts walking.

And it doesn’t take him long to remember having walked down here before. Twenty years prior on one of his last few visits to his father’s farm before his mother had become completely unbearable he remembers being herded down with a gaggle of sibling, cousins, and other village children. He even remembers swimming out to a rock that stuck out of the water to play, and subsequently win, games of King of the Rock.

Soon his feet sink into the sand and he emerges seaside, greeted by a blast of salty air and the scream of gulls high above. The docks are a bit more extensive than he remembers, with a hardy sailboat tethered off to the far right, not too far from King’s Rock. The old bait shop is exactly where he remembers it, with new rooms haphazardly added on to extend its size.

Mostly, he stares at the mound of something that’s laid out near the firepit. His first thought is a pile of wood and brush, perhaps for burning.

And then it unfurls, arching onto its back to stretch a body even bigger than Edric’s across the sand. A dragonkin lying in the sun. And he’d thought that seeing the kiil’rah here was odd—this was just otherworldly.

Just when he thinks that’s enough, though, a shadow flickers over the sand. He watches the lithe figure land beside the first dragonkin, winged instead of tailed like his companion, the same man he recalls seeing during Virinii’s tour. He shares a few words with the mound of hair and tail on the sand, then daintily steps over him to walk over to Fergus.

“Ey there, mate, you’re that newcomer Virinii was talkin’ about, aren’t’cha?” He runs his words together in a ridiculous and hard to understand accent, one that doesn’t match his slim body and upright posture.

“Yeah, Fergus.” He sticks out a hand to shake.

“Josan.” He takes his hand. Fergus can’t help but notice that it feels more like touching gritty sandstone than flesh or even scales. “The big guy back there is Tam. You just ‘ere for introductions, or summin’ more?”

“I was talking to Edric—”

“Joy that conversation must’ve been.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” he says flatly. “He sent me over looking for a fishing rod you might have lying around.”

“Oh plenty. You ever fish before, mate?”

“No.”

“City man, I guess. C’mon, I’ll give you a quick lesson. Ain’t too ‘ard.”

Fergus doesn’t know how much he trusts the old docks. It takes Josan’s weight easily but Josan couldn’t weigh more than a damn feather. It must take Tam’s weight, though, and he’s just about big enough to weigh more than a house. He’ll take that little bit of reassurance.

Josan comes back out with two old looking rods, saving him the trouble of asking him for an extra in case CJ wanted to fish (he doesn’t see her being any more excited about the prospect than he is though).

“Every bloody start up dumbass wants to fling the rod over their ‘ead like in the movies,” Josan says. “That’s a good way t’get a hook in your hair if you’re lucky and your ass if you’re right fucking unlucky. Just cast it off your side, make sure the lock’s free, ‘old the string wit’cher fingers, then let it fly.”

He casts far into the ocean, and begins slowly reeling in. He soon meets resistance, though, and hands it off to Fergus, instructing him on reeling in a fish. Soon, he’s pulled up a fish that Josan calls a herring.

“Congrats, you can fish,” he says. He rips the still wriggling fish off the hook and slams it against the wall of the store so it goes still. “You’ll want gloves to grab it, though. Fuckers are right slippery on normal skin.”

“Good to know.”

“Mmhm. If you wanna eat these, though…fuck it, I’ll show you ‘ow to clean a fish another day,” he grumbles. “I got some clean ‘erring in here that you can take ‘ome an’ eat.”

Once they trade, Fergus thanks him and leaves, pleased to have found what seems like the only relatively normal person in town. Even if he does have a pair of black leather wing on his back.

When he gets back to his bike, there’s two teens standing around it. He stifles a sigh. Last thing he wants is another social interaction. Especially considering the younger of the two, a freckled young girl, brightens up at the sight of him.

“Hey, this is yours, huh? Right good ride, mate, you should teach me some time.”

He loads his things on the bike, trying to look as disinterested as possible to make her leave as he replies, “Yeah? And how old are you?”

“Seventeen?”

“Fourteen,” the boy speaks up, smirking when she shoots him a wicked glare.

“Good luck with that, then,” Fergus says, getting on the bike and driving off before he can be roped into another conversation.

By the time he makes it back to CJ, it feels like it’s been a century. It’s been an hour, though, and CJ’s done with the grass. She even mowed it. He would thank for that, but it’s a matter of pride now.

“So’d you fuck?” were, unfortunately, the first words out of her mouth.

He scowls. “No, of course not. I promised him fish.”

She cocks an eyebrow. “Fish?”

He gestures towards the fishing rods. “Apparently it’s not as boring as it is in the city, but that remains to be seen. I’ll wait on that, though. Let’s till this so we can finally plant and start feeling actually fucking productive.”

He expects some bite back, but she merely grabs the hoes. “Yeah, good idea.”


	3. A Rollercoaster Where You Try to Figure Out if They Can Actually Live With Each Other or Not But Lord Knows it Ain’t Easy Because They’re Both Stubborn As Shit

Over the course of the rest of the week, they systematically start weeding weeds, cutting grass, and moving debris out of the way. It’s utterly back breaking, but when Fergus wakes up sore it’s a good kind of sore, the sore of well-worked muscles and jobs well done.

It takes the first few days to move enough debris to plant all the seeds Lervaela got them (he’s shocked to see that the parsnips have already sprouted) and then a few days after that of merely cleaning up the farm and making the place look and feel a little more lived in. The jobs are mainly small fix-its and IOUs: a tarp over the hole in the shed, duct tape to save the integrity of a few scavenged tools, a pile of brush that desperately needs to be dealt with. It’s better than nothing, though, and it gives him plenty for his restless soul to occupy itself with.

CJ is…tolerable. He minds her company—and her constant snipes—less than he expects. It doesn’t become truly companionable, friendly even, until the end of their first week, though, while they’re watering the plants.

“Fergus, look, new watering technique,” she says.

He watches in dismay as she uses her watering can to whip a jet of water across their poor plants.

“That’s terrible,” he says.

“It’s efficient!”

“You’re going to destroy the leaves.”

In response, she turns and splashes a stream of water all up his front, only missing his face when he flings up his hands to block it. Laughing to herself, she goes back to watering.

Maybe she just didn’t expect retaliation. Maybe she fooled herself into thinking he wasn’t capable of it. Regardless, when he irritably upturns his watering can over her head, she doesn’t expect it, shrieking and sputtering in alarm.

She looks at him in utter betrayal, and he can’t help but smirk triumphantly. Then she sprints for the river.

“Oh no you don’t!”

He runs after her, and soon it’s all out war, scooping up water and throwing it at the other until they’re soaked to the skin. It ends when CJ foolishly attempts to shove him in, and he carelessly grabs her arms and sends her crashing into the water.

“NO FAIR!” she comes up yelling.

He laughs as he watches her haul herself out of the river, looking like a drowned rat. “Not my fault you got the short genetics! How the hell did you end up half my size?”

“Screw you, Fergus! You think I wouldn’t be tall if I could be?!”

“Height is a choice.”

She screams and grabs the watering can, prompting him to run back to the farmhouse with an unrestrained laugh.

He doesn’t take up Roy on his offer to take him to the saloon and introduce him to the rest of the town, but he doesn’t fail to notice how regularly CJ disappears. He’s not her keeper, though, and she always slinks back before one or two in the morning at the latest. It doesn’t bother him, until one day she comes back in the evening, looking oddly surreptitious.

He soon finds out why. “Is that a fucking dog?” he spits, bristling at the look of the unsightly creature. He could barely call it a dog at all with the way its fur hangs limp and clumped from its skinny frame, like a mop rag in dog form.

Before CJ can respond, though, he jerks a finger towards the door. “Get it out. Get it the fuck out.”

“So what if there’s a dog?!” she exclaims. “We’re gonna have animals here, aren’t we?!”

Feeling himself getting panicky, he stutters out a frantic excuse: “Because it’s fucking dirty, CJ!” he yells. “So get it out of the house and clean it up first!”

“I’m gonna clean him in the tub!”

“The fuck you are, get it out!”

Finally, she relents. “He’s a he, not an it,” is her final response before she slinks back outside, bringing her droopy mop creature with her.

All the fight leaves Fergus the moment the dog disappears and he sits down in a kitchen chair before he collapses into an unceremonious heap on the kitchen floor. CJ’s outside for a while longer, but it’s not nearly long enough for him to have composed himself by the time she storms back inside.

“What’s your fucking problem?” she snaps.

“You can keep the dog, but it stays the fuck outside,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because I fucking said so, CJ.”

“Since when are you the fucking boss of me? If I want my dog in the house I should be able to have him in the house! I own it too!”

He jerks to his feet, and it’s a bit fast because CJ involuntarily flinches. He’s too worked up to care.

“The dog stays out of the house or the dog gets driven to the first fucking kill shelter I find!” he yells, so on the brink of hysteria that he can barely monitor his tone. “How about that?!”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, and storms into his room, slamming the door behind him.

CJ spends the first night elsewhere. He doesn’t care where, doesn’t even care that she leaves him to water and tend the crops the next morning. Really he’s too concerned with watching the unnamed dog, which CJ had at least had the sense to tie up far enough away that he wouldn’t step outside and into its waiting jaws. Horror scenarios about the dog breaking the lead and sprinting straight at him haunted him as it was.

It sleeps the entire time he’s outside, though. It doesn’t even bark. He still can’t relax around it, and that night a dozen amorphous, toothy jaws descend on him and tear him apart until he wakes up in a cold sweat.

The next day CJ comes back and helps him with the crops but is fuming so hard that he can just about feel the anger coming off of her. He ignores her, gives her space, and lets her take the side of the field closest to the dog. Again, he’s more preoccupied with the animal than he is her, and the moment chores are done he grabs his bike and takes to the highway.

He sleeps easier that night, but only because he returned late enough that he couldn’t see the dog in the dark. Nonetheless, he tosses and turns.

On the third day, during a tiring hour of watching the dog and doing chores, CJ says: “I guess you don’t like dogs.”

He exhales through his nose and wishes the tension had gone with it, but if anything it’s worse, spinning his gut into tight little knots and squeezing like an entire fist around his airway. As if he hasn’t had enough of that in that past seventy-two hours.

She had extended that more as a peace offering than the flat statement of obvious fact, though. Not a demand for information but a request for it nonetheless. Certainly not something he can bat aside with the vitriol he desires. And maybe she deserves that much, after he’d yelled her out of the house with no explanation. 

“No,” he says slowly, “but I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you for it. You didn’t know.”

“No, I mean, I’m not a mind reader.”

He busies himself with pulling up full grown parsnips a little harder as he replies: “No, you’re not, but when…” He trails off, groping for words. “When you’re a kid, shit happens that you can’t just shake, I guess.”

“I get that.”

He relaxes finally. More so relieved that she wasn’t digging for details. He had enough trouble with nightmare reminders, he didn’t want more from verbal ones. He doesn’t feel like telling the story anyways. Maybe more for embarrassment than anything, though. At the end of the day, he provoked that dog, deserved that bite.

“You can keep the dog,” he emphasizes. “Just don’t expect me to get buddy with it. Him.”

“Good Boy.”

“I’m sure he’s fine—”

“No, that’s his name.” He sighs, and she giggles. He’s glad to hear it, to be honest. “He can stay outside, but I’m gonna get Petrisse to build him a dog house and I’ll hafta pay her _something.”_

“That’s fine. We’ve got parsnips to sell now, so we’ll have money.”

“Oh that reminds me, Virinii said we could leave stuff in the bin and shoot her a text and she’ll come by to sell it for us.”

Just like that, the floodgates open between them. He didn’t realize how much he missed her chatter during their fight. Really, though, he’s refreshed that a fight could end like this. He’s used to days of silence between them, simmering anger ready to burst out at the smallest slight. That CJ had cooled down, had been the first one to speak to him in the first place, baffles him more and more as he dwells on it.

He hopes it stays this way.

Now with a bit of money from their parsnips, he gives CJ his blessing for a night of splurging at the saloon. She leaves at just after five and he doesn’t expect to see her until tomorrow morning, so he settles by the old firepit and tries to draw.

The key word is try. He hasn’t drawn in what feels like years. His motivation to do so had all but sizzled out after an explosive argument with his ex about money constraints—commissions wasn’t cutting it, and she demanded he get something more reliable.

Really, he just doesn’t know how to start. He barely remembers what he liked to draw and dreads even thought of going through his old sketchbooks and looking. He ends up staring at Good Boy for the next hour, and Good Boy doesn’t even give him the satisfaction of staring back.

Fortunately, someone comes to save him from his thoughts. He glances up, only hearing Rivah at the last possible second.

At first glance, Rivah looks a lot more like Lervaela, just as Edric looks a lot like Virinii. At second glance, her fur is darker, a dusky grey and lacking her mother’s curls which Edric boasts in excess. Both siblings inherited their sheer amount of fur from Lervaela, though, and Rivah, though she’s clearly female, has long curtains draping from her arms and tail like the trailing leaves of a weeping willow.

She’s pretty, whatever pretty means for a kiil’rah, but Fergus is more hoping that she’s nothing like Edric, whose personality leaves him a week’s worth of social interaction in the span of five minutes.

“I suppose you’re the quiet t-type. Luh-Like my brother,” she comments, coming to a stop on the other side of the firepit. The stutter doesn’t seem intentional; she speaks just as confidently as the rest of her family.

“I wouldn’t describe Edric as quiet.”

He’s not sure what amused looks like on a kiil, but he hopes twitching whiskers is it. “No, my other brother. Have you met A-luh-llerick?”

“I haven’t.”

“He might be more your speed.” She moves around the pit to deposit a large box beside his chair. “Mother sent me with supplies. CJ t-told her about your dog. Wanted to send some of our old dog stuff.”

“I’ll let CJ go through that,” he says with finality. “Thank you.”

“Mother’s pleasure.” She pauses and scans the fields. “It—It looks like you’re making progress. Do you need any help?”

“Not so far.”

“Well in the event that you get animals, talk to Mother. She’ll—She will be happy to order some for you. She gets plenty of good discounts.”

“We’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”

“And last thing,” she says, one ear twisting back as she hesitates. Nervousness looks odd on her. Not when she holds herself so upright and regal, much like Virinii. Finally, she says, “Last thing, Fergus, before you came to—to live here I used your luh-land as a quick path to the mountains. Trespassing, of course, but it means less when the owner isn’t around…”

“That’s fine,” he says before she finishes. “The dog doesn’t really bark, so even if you pass by late you won’t be disturbing us.”

“Thank you. It makes my life easier.” One more time, she pauses, tail swishing slowly behind her. Then: “I, ah, I heard that you were interested in fishing. The mountains—There are many places to, to fish in the mountains.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”

She clears her throat. “Actual…last thing: I know where you can find catfish. Come by the ranch on a rainy day, and I will—I’ll show you the spot. Best pay back Edric quick, no?”

He gives her a grimacing smile. “Yeah, definitely.”

He’s dying for this conversation to end. After Edric’s charm, Virinii’s control of a conversation, and Lervaela’s warmth, he hadn’t expected Rivah to be so stilted in comparison. Even she seems to sense that she’s been there too long, though, as she huffs to herself, bids him farewell, and heads towards the path leading to the mountains.

Out of distractions and not wanting to be around for another stilted conversation when she inevitably came back down, Fergus heads inside for the night.


	4. In Which They’re Idiots Who Don’t Realize That Catfish Are Fucking Huge

On the third morning of their third week, Fergus was relieved to wake up late and see that it was raining. It meant they didn’t need to water the plants.

Two hours later, as he slogs through wet underbrush with CJ, Rivah, and fishing poles that catch on every branch and every stick, he’s lost that sense of relief to misery. Even though the canopy overhead has grown thick with spring growth, he’s nonetheless soaked. Strands of whatever hair remains free of his hastily done up bun stick annoyingly to his face and somehow keep finding their way into his mouth.

At least CJ seems equally unimpressed with the trip, her hair similarly plastered to her head and making the pair of them look more like siblings than uncle and niece, a fact which Lervaela commented on before sending them on their merry way.

Rivah, though? Rivah doesn’t look the least bit bothered, even despite smelling like Fergus’s roughest approximation of wet cat. Her fur sticks out in damp peaks that makes her pelt a frigid landscape, a far cry from the plushness she normally sported. Fergus wants to know what her secret is. He can’t even handle a bit of wet hair.

“We’re here,” she says.

They’ve spent one of the last two hours slogging through the Cindersap Forest, and that’s the best thing Fergus has heard for the entire trek. She ducks beneath the heavy boughs of a pine and leads them along to a short path. It opens up to the river roaring, tumbling eagerly over a small cliff to their right and across a patch of painful looking rocks before it swirls into the dammed up pool that stretches like a mini lake before them.

Rivah gestures towards the end of the pond and says something about beavers damming up the place that he doesn’t care about. He’s fixated on the thrashing in the middle of the pond, where the occasional fin breaches and where bubbles rise in the interim.

“The pond’s deep,” Rivah adds. “They only come up in the rain. You’ll catch something quick.” Turning back the way they came, she adds, “I will be foraging. Call when you get a bite.”

He’s sure she means when they’re ready to leave. CJ does him the favour of saying bye to Rivah while he walks up to where the slate rock juts a short ways over the water.

“I should push you in and watch them eat you up,” CJ says from behind.

He snorts and rolls his eyes. “I’d like to see you try.”

She gives him a playful shove and he doesn’t even give her the satisfaction of pretending it could move him. She sticks her tongue out, grabs her fishing rod, and casts towards the bubbles.

“Hey, Edric said these guys go for like more than two hundred bucks, right?” she says. “We should catch a bunch and sell them. We could be swimming in it!”

It doesn’t seem like it should be that easy, and yet… “As many as we can carry, at least.”

“Yeah, exactly! Hey, I think I got a bi—”

She never finishes that thought, as her rod and she along with it are jerked violently forward. Fergus grabs her around the waist, but even he has to dig his heels into the slimy rock as whatever monster has gotten hold of CJ’s hook pulls with a vengeance, yanking them to and fro in a hysteric panic trying to free itself.

And then, right before their eyes, a four foot catfish thrashes its head above the water and fixes them with beady black eyes filled with nothing but malice.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!” CJ shrieks.

Fergus, so busy trying to keep them both upright, barely manages to retort: “OH WHAT YOU THINK I KNOW?!”

“FISH SHOULDN’T BE THAT BIG!”

“NO SHIT, CJ!”

Thankfully wearing gloves, Fergus staggers forward to grab the line itself. By now the monster fish has him knee deep in the pool, and for CJ that’s halfway up her thighs, and he has nothing but pebbly river bottom to try to dig into. He manages to create a little bit of slack for CJ to start reeling in, but the fish isn’t going to make it easy.

For his first time fishing, though, he has to admit it’s far more the adventure than he thought it would be.

He’s nearly sent sprawling back when the catfish abruptly switches direction, surging towards them. CJ _does_ fall back, but she’s got the sense to keep reeling in even while half-submerged, audience to him trying to keep his damn balance when the slimy idiot barrels straight into him.

Thank small miracles for Rivah, though. He understands her parting comment now as she comes flying out of the trees, bristling with teeth and claws, to block off the catfish’s escape. Exhausted already but renewed by the fact that he wasn’t about to let anyone, even a kiil’rah, show him up, Fergus readjusts his hold on the line and slowly but surely inches the catfish towards land.

It’s with some small, smug contentment that he notices how even Rivah has trouble corralling the thing.

Whatever it eats has made it fat enough that they soon drive it into the shallows, but that’s where the fight truly begins. The catfish, like anything, doesn’t want to die and in the land of air it seems no less capable at it leaps and thrashes and squirms. Even with her claws, Rivah can’t get a grip, and leaves pretty little marks to record her failings.

Getting a little too close to simply throwing it back in the river, Fergus makes an attempt to straddle it and pin it like some sort of wrestling match. It doesn’t go well. He never thought a fish could be big enough to hit him across the face hard enough as to stun him, but it does and he can swear he isn’t imagining the smug pride in its beady little eyes, as if to say “if I’m going down, then I’m going to make sure you look like the biggest asshole while doing it.”

So he grabs a rock and bashes the damn thing in the head.

After a few good whacks, he goes from wrestling the biggest goddamn fish he’s ever seen to straddling a dead fish like the world’s worst necrophiliac. He doesn’t even have the energy to get off.

“You know what?” he says to CJ between breaths. “I think this might be all we can carry.”

“Yeah,” she says, wheezing out a laugh as she wipes her hair out of her face. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“Did…you not realize that catfish are big?” Rivah says. “Some are as long as I am t-tall.”

“They get bigger?!” he nearly shrieks. “ _Fuck_ Edric!”

“Ugh, why didn’t you?” CJ grumbles. “It would’ve been way easier.”

“Why don’t you fuck him?” he snaps back.

“Edric is gay,” Rivah says a matter-of-factually as she begins dragging the catfish up the shore.

“Yeah, Fergus, Edric’s gay,” CJ says.

“Like you fucking knew.”

She makes a face at him. He pretends he didn’t see it and together they haul the fish onto the shore. He’s about to ask how the hell they planned on getting it home, when Rivah lifts it up and onto her shoulders.

“What would you have done if it was bigger?” he says in disbelief.

“Cut the luh-line,” she retorts. “I dropped my basket when I heard you. You can pick it up for me on our way back.”

“I don’t wanna walk back,” CJ groans, voicing what Fergus didn’t plan on saying.

“Then I will sell your work myself.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Fergus growls. “We’re coming.”

He wishes Rivah had given them even a second to catch their breath before getting them up and walking back on jelly legs. Fortunately, they meet Lervaela in her truck once the forest gives way to the plains of her ranch land. Rivah throws their catch in the back, and smell or not, Fergus and CJ are eager to flank it.

“Next time we fish? Not there,” Fergus announces as the truck gets moving.

“ _Agreed,”_ she says, draping an arm across her eyes. “I can’t believe these stupid things even exist. I thought we were just getting him some dinky little fish that he was too lazy to get himself.”

“Can you not talk shit about him when his mother and sister are right there?” he says out the corner of his mouth.

She huffs. “What? Like I’m wrong?”

“No, but does the entire damn world need to know about how right you are?”

“Yeah.”

He’s too tired to keep rolling his eyes at her. “I think that’s the most excitement I’ve had ever.”

“Yeah? I thought your dad owned the farm. Didn’t you grow up here?”

“Yes and no? Parents were divorced, and Mom got most custody. I’ve been crammed into a tiny shit apartment since day one.”

“Huh. Same here,” she mutters. “You at least like it out here?”

“More than the city. Could do without people popping in whenever they feel like it. Who does that?”

“Anyone with a fucking social life, Fergus, come _on.”_

“And did I ask for a social life? No.”

She sits up to glare at him. “Yeah, duh, you sit in your room all the time. Were you seriously just gonna come out here and make no friends?”

He shrugs, and instantly feels like a sulky child. The thought of making friends not only seems downright insurmountable, but like a waste of time. The city was everchanging. People cycled in and out of his life so regularly that he can’t remember the last time he called someone a friend and meant it.

His ex, maybe, but it seems like some unspoken rule that your partner is the only friend you get once school is all said and done. It makes sense that CJ wouldn’t get it, then. She has to be fresh out of high school, still lugging around the belief that life is suited at all to _friendship_.

Finally he answers her: “I came here because I needed some place where I could stand up straight and not hit my head on something. I came because—because obviously nothing was working out in the city. You know dead-end jobs? I had a dead-end life.”

He still feels like he does. In the city, progression is promotion. He knew he would never have that, so caged in his cubicle for bad behaviour like he had been. But out here, he doesn’t know what progression looks like. There’s no series of higher and higher rankings, of new job titles and raises and pats on the back to tell him if he’s actually moving. For all he knows, he’s gathering dust out here.

He doesn’t like thinking that he came out here to stand in the same spot for the rest of his life, though. It’s the same as the city, really, just with a better view.

“I guess,” CJ says. “Ever think that your new life should have friends in it, though?”

Instead of answering that and inevitably shattering whatever rose-coloured view she has of adulthood, he asks, “Well why did you come out here?”

“Cus the city sucked and I was poor,” she says without missing a beat. “I bet you at least had your own room in your apartment. I got a little section of the living room with a curtain around it.”

He grimaces. “No, I shared mine with my ex.” She hisses through her teeth, but he shrugs it off. “It’s fine, we’re done. I get what you mean, though. About being poor—we were dual income and still lived paycheck to paycheck. I had to sell a bunch of stuff just to have enough money to get out here.”

“You kept your car, though?”

“Of course I kept my car. That car was basically the first thing I got to really call mine.”

“But the car _and_ the motorcycle?”

“Well next time you want to go into the city and not want to pay for a bus ticket, don’t come crawling to me.”

“What so you can use your car _and_ your motorcycle to drive me out there?” she says dryly.

“It’s about sentimentality!”

They both burst into snickering, letting it bubble between the two of them before falling quiet. The rain keeps coming down and they listen for a spell, and for once in his goddamn life Fergus convinces himself that nothing is wrong and that maybe life can be something pleasurable.

“You know what we should do?” CJ says.

He sighs. “Is this going to be something stupid?”

“ _No_ , we should use the money we get from this thing because it _has_ to be over two hund-y and go to the saloon.”

He grimaces. “I think we should start saving some money.”

“Come on, when have you _ever_ had this much disposable income?”

“In high school but I wasn’t really using it to pay for my niece’s social hour.”

“It’s not just for me, you’re coming too!”

“I don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to,” she mocks. “You’re coming anyways. You know literally everyone I’ve talked to is like ‘oh when do we get to meet your farmmate’ because you haven’t even introduced yourself and it’s been like three weeks in a town of thirty people how have you not introduced yourself to _anyone_?”

“Did you even breathe while saying that?” She glares at him, fiercely and silently demanding he answer. “Fine, I’ll go with you for dinner. Anything more than that means you’re lucky.”

She fist pumps. “Yes!”

“Why you’re obsessed with me meeting people, I’ll never know.”

“Because when you mope around looking stupid and lonely it’s annoying,” she shoots back. “I’m going to get you one stupid friend in this town and _maybe_ it’ll get you out of the house long enough for me to throw a party or something.”

“Real vote of fucking confidence, CJ.”

She merely laughs.

Fortunately Lervaela takes them straight to Edric. Fergus just wants to go home and not look at Edric’s smarmy grin as he comes out of the blacksmith and warmly greets his mother and sister.

The rain has beaded on his mane like little sparkling pearls by the time he walks over to take a look at the fish they caught, and his eyebrows disappear beneath his bangs as he runs his gaze along the length of it in admiration.

“Good catch,” he says.

“A little more than a couple hundred, I hope?” Fergus says.

“I think I can spare. How about I treat you to dinner at the saloon?” When Fergus grimaces, he snorts and adds: “You don’t want to be friends, that’s fine. Doesn’t need to be at the same table. Just tell Jean it’s on my tab.”

With that, he pulls the fish out of the truck and hauls it onto his shoulders with even more ease than Rivah had. He decides to revise their dinner deal and turns to CJ.

“If we do dinner, I’m showering and napping first.”

She pats her pockets, as if to check her phone, but they’d both intelligently left them at home. “Yeah, same. Prolly not suppertime anyways. Lervaela!” She drapes herself over the edge of the truck, interrupting hers and Rivah’s conversation while Fergus winces. “Lervaela, could we get a ride home?”

Fergus wants to burst out with a quick “no thanks, we’ll walk” but Lervaela’s already chuckling. “Of course! Bringing in a fish that big had to have been exhausting.”

He isn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he shuts up while CJ beams and says, “Thank you!”

Unfortunately, the nap sucks. He’s woken up by CJ pounding on the door telling him they should go soon, and he feels like he barely closed his eyes. The morning’s workout is already sneaking into his muscles and joints. He gets up and gets dressed anyways.

“It stopped raining,” he comments in the kitchen, where CJ is basking in the light coming through the windows.

“Yeah, so it _was_ a good thing we went fishing early,” she remarks.

“Was it? My back says otherwise.”

“Huh, maybe you should stop being so old then.”

“I wish. Enjoy youth while it lasts, kiddo.”

They step outside, and while CJ goes to check on Good Boy (whose presence has slowly become less and less anxiety inducing) he grabs his bike. The moment she spots him with it, though, she all but sprints over.

“Are we riding the bike?” she says, vibrating with barely contained excitement.

“What? Would you rather walk?” She shakes her head vigorously. “Then get on and let’s go.”

“No helmets?”

“If you’re stupid enough to get on a bike with me, you’re stupid enough to not wear a helmet.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He just laughs at her. “It’s not even a five minute drive anyways.”

This is the second time he’s ridden his bike into town, and he gets just as many looks from passersby as the first time. CJ seems to soak up the attention, even despite riding on the more disappointing side of the bike.

Though it’s bright outside, the Stardrop Saloon interior is cast in warm orange light, accompanied by the crackle of a fireplace to keep it toasty. The floor creaks old and worn underfoot, and the patrons have their fingers on the mood, keeping their voices low and soft. Only occasionally does the clink of dishes or the clang of pots and pans interrupt it while the pair behind the bar prep and cook.

The saloon isn’t too populated, even for a Friday night. He checks his phone and realizes that, for all her pestering, CJ brought them early. If it’s going to be quiet, though, then he can hardly complain.

“Ooh, get a seat, I wanna say hi!” CJ doesn’t even let him have a word in edgewise before rushing off to the nearest occupied table.

He settles down in the corner of the room, furthest from the action, to watch. She approaches a table with a couple of fae, of all things, greeting them like old friends. The noise level in the room almost instantly doubles as the exuberant blond matches her energy. Their blue haired companion looks much quieter, but nonetheless seems to know CJ well when she speaks to them next.

Besides that pair, there’s a man at the far end of the bar, occasionally sharing words with the couple working, his blond hair greying and his glasses sliding down his facing, needing readjustment every few moments. Josan is there in the opposite corner, sharing words with Roy and a young blond Fergus hasn’t met.

Someone he has met comes to the table, though, clutching a couple menus to his chest. The teen who’d been admiring his bike the last time he’d been in town. He’s dressed now in an apron, with his ginger curls pulled back and a nervous smile on his face—one that doesn’t match the metal studding his face and ears.

“Hello, I’m Skylar, your waiter tonight!” he introduces himself cheerfully despite that trepidation. “I remember we met a couple weeks ago? Your motorcycle is sick. I’ve never met someone who rides one.”

He accepts the menu Skylar hands him. “Yeah, I remember. I’m Fergus. Sorry I didn’t introduce myself, I was, uh…in a hurry.”

The lie drops from his lips pretty unconvincingly but Skylar doesn’t seem like the skeptical type as he laughs and shrugs it off. “Nah, I get it. It’s cool though, uh, I’ve wanted a motorcycle ever since I knew they existed.”

He doesn’t know how to talk to teenagers. And sure he’s probably only a couple years younger than CJ, but it’s not like he knows how to talk to her either.

So he settles for an awkward laugh and says, “They’re pretty dangerous. Not for everyone. I need another menu,” he adds, noticing CJ approaching after a lively conversation with the woman behind the bar. “For her.”

“Hi, Skylar!” CJ says as she slides into her chair, making the poor kid jump a little.

“Hey, Jeannie,” he says, plopping a second menu in front of her. “How’s the farm?”

Thankful that she’s here to deflect any further conversation, Fergus busies himself looking through the menu. Other people filter into the saloon and Skylar is drawn away as activity picks up.

“You’re bad at this, huh?” CJ says.

“At what?” he deadpans.

“Making friends.”

“Sorry? He’s a teenager.”

She purses her lips, then huffs. “Okay, fine. How ‘bout you talk to Kane, then? He’s the old dude at the bar.”

“Looks like he’s got a decade on me. No chance.”

“If you’re going to rule out everyone I suggest then what’s the point!”

“Did I ask for you to help me ‘make friends?’” he retorts. “Ever consider I don’t _want_ friends?”

She rolls her eyes. “Go up to the bar and get me a vodka cranberry.”

“Please? Thank you?”

She makes shooing motions with her hands. He growls a curse beneath his breath and reluctantly stands and heads for the bar with absolutely no plans to get her the drink she wants.

“Hey there, darling,” the woman says, meeting him at the cash register. “What’s on the menu today?”

“Just a coffee.”

“Shot of Bailey’s?” She grabs the bottle off ice and gives it a little tempting shake.

He shouldn’t drink. He shouldn’t drink. _He shouldn’t drink._

“Yeah, just a bit,” he says, which translates to “a lot, actually” and she seems to know it, upturning the bottle over the mug a second longer than he wishes.

“So I hear you’ve taken over Mr. Demir’s old farm,” she says as she fills his cup, pausing to ask his preference (just sugar). “It’s a tough job, I hope you’re up to it.”

“Lasted this long.” He eagerly accepts the mug. “I like a challenge.”

She chuckles, but he can’t shake the feeling that she’s scrutinizing him a little more closely than he’d like. “I bet. Say, I know you? I grew up here, and Mr. Demir was always bringing his daughters and nieces and nephews around to play. Are you one of his nephews? I’m Jean, by the way.”

Jean. Hell, he did actually remember that name. “I, uh…” He hadn’t actually expected anyone to recognize him. Finally, he admits, “Yeah, I’m his son. I remember you. We were really good friends, actually.”

Her eyes light up. “I do remember you! Remind me of your name?”

“Fergus.”

“Fergus! I like it.” She winks at him, but it’s so delightfully playful, none of the sleazy suggestion dropped by Edric, that he actually smiles and laughs a little. “Give me your number and I’ll let you get back to CJ, but we should catch up, alright?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

They trade phone numbers and he slides back into his seat across from CJ.

“Wow, look, you can talk to other people,” she comments, halfway through a text on her own phone. “I’m proud of you.”

“Shut up.”

“What! I mean it! Hey, where’s my drink?” He smirks at her and she groans. “You’re the worst!”

She gets up and he watches her walk up to the bar and talk to Jean. He can practically here her making comments about him, but he turns back to his coffee and decides he’s not going to worry about it.

It’s a nice feeling.


	5. Fergus Finally Makes a Friend But Still Fails to Understand the Very Concept of Adults Having Friends Anyways

The days start to fly by. Every three days feel like one, but he takes the breakneck progression of time over the sluggish “every one day feels like three” drag that had been his city life. The farm is looking better every day, and as time passes he no longer feels as sore the morning after a tough day. He admits that’s in part to the argument he had with CJ, who complained that he was overworking them. She managed to convince him that eight hour days where not necessary in the country.

He can’t even begin to fathom that. Between tending the crops and their agreed upon one to two hours spent cleaning, they rarely put in more than five hours. And that means he suddenly has a lot of free time on his hands.

Today’s not one of those days, though, as they spend the better part of the morning harvesting cauliflower, potatoes, and yet another batch of parsnips. Lervaela mentioned that cauliflower goes for the highest price, and he has to fight to hide his excitement. He wants more funds and he wants them as soon as possible.

Fortunately, Roy finished cleaning and polishing their tilling machine. He dropped it off yesterday, then invited himself in to talk his ear off for a clean hour before CJ came in with a made up excuse for Fergus to go with her and Roy to go home.

She’s annoying, but she has her moments, he decides begrudgingly.

“We should get _all_ cauliflower this time!” CJ says, grimacing as she tries to stretch out her aching back. “I’m sick of harvesting stupid parsnips every two weeks!”

“What did you say to me last time I complained about my back? Oh, that’s right: stop being so old.”

“But I’m not old!”

“I don’t know, it tends to sneak up on you.”

She sneers at him, a little harder when he grabs their bags of crops and lifts them with ease to deposit in their produce box for Virinii to take. Instead of commenting, however, she takes the veggies they put aside for themselves to eat. By the time he’s packed everything into the box and waiting for her on his phone, she’s come back out.

Jean texted him this morning asking him to come by her house after noon. He’s tired and he wants to nap, but he nonetheless tells her that he’ll be there. He just hopes that whatever she needs, it’ll be quick.

“Can we take the motorcycle?” CJ asks.

“Yeah, but you’ll need to walk home after. Jean needs me to do something.”

She scoffs, but doesn’t complain any further, which he supposes is the only good thing about her mission to make sure he has friends. And why he doesn’t tell her that she probably just wants his help with something.

Caught up in his thoughts, he starts the motorcycle before CJ’s ready and she nearly flies off the back. He immediately stops when she yelps and grabs the back of his jacket.

“Hey!” she yells. “I didn’t even say I was ready!”

“Sorry,” he says, stifling a chuckle. “I did that to my ex the only time she road my bike with me and she got so mad at me that she never road on it again.”

“Yeah? Well you’d hafta try harder to get rid of me.”

“She also fell completely off, so I think I still have a chance.”

“Oh my god, just _go.”_

He’s been to Estill’s once or twice to buy more seeds. Normally Miser is manning the counter, and Fergus likes Miser: he’s handsome, he doesn’t talk much, and he’s built like a brick shit house. He gets on with anyone who isn’t actively trying to pry into his life, though, and the other two points are really just icing on the tall, muscular cake.

Miser’s manning the counter today too fortunately, reading something while a couple other customers browse. The fact that he’s both sitting _and_ reading while on the job boggles Fergus’s mind. He’s never seen a cashier allowed to just…do that.

When they go up to pay for the packets of seeds (and a few other things for planned meals which they already spent all morning arguing over) the bell on the store door chimes.

“Hell-ooooooooooooooooh Pelican Town!” a shrill voice pierces the quiet.

Fergus and CJ turn to watch a young woman, her hair blindingly blond and just barely tamed by a high ponytail, strut into the store. He spots the double J logo on the breast of her blazer and nearly turns back to what he’s doing. She has a way of demanding the attention of the entire room, though, as she thrusts an arm into the air and waves around a handful of colourful coupons.

“I’m _so_ sorry for interrupting your morning shopping, but I have a deal that you all just _need_ to hear!” A grin slides across her face, and Fergus is distinctly reminded of every slimy manager he’s ever had. “Take one of these bad boys and get 50% off everything at Joja Mart!”

Without a second thought, everyone in the store leaves their purchases to grab one of the coupons. Even Miser rises to his feet, but it’s only to watch, his lip twitching ever so slightly, as, one by one, his customers grab the coupons and leave the store. Everyone except Fergus and CJ, that is.

“Oh, good thing I caught you,” the woman says as she strides over to them. “You can get those seeds for _much less_ at Joja Mart.”

Fergus side-eyes CJ for a split second to judge her feelings—not great, she’s glaring pretty hard at Lizz—and slaps the fifty he’d been prepping on the counter.

“Sorry,” he says with a sneer, “looks like you’re a bit too late.”

Her expression immediately sours, but she thrusts the coupons forward nonetheless. “I don’t know what to say, new guy. You should really get used to Joja in this town, though—for some reason every time we open up in places like this, all the small shops go out of business!”

“For some reason?” Miser pipes up, his growl a heavy contrast to her shrill voice. “You sell at a loss on purpose. Take the financial hit, drive out the competition.”

She smiles pityingly at him. “Tell Estill that maybe she should learn how to better cater to her customers, big guy. Joja shops smart! We find suppliers who sell for less—so we can sell to you for less!” She rattles off the old Joja slogan with an obnoxious grin.

Miser’s nearly snarling by now, but he maintains a miraculous calm as he says: “You’re not buying anything. Leave.”

“Rude. I just wanted to show you some actually _good_ salesmanship.” She turns on the heel nonetheless, but not before tucking one of the coupons into CJ’s pocket. “There you go, sweetie, in case you change your mind.”

She attempts to do the same to Fergus, but he grabs her wrist. “Don’t touch me,” he snarls.

She raises her eyebrows at him. She has nothing more than three inches on five foot, but she’s not the least bit intimidated as she giggles and slaps the coupon on top of their pile of seeds.

“For you, handsome. Y’wanna fuck? Name’s Lizz.” She winks, makes a phone by her ear, and mouths “call me” before leaving the store.

“Fucking Joja,” Fergus snarls beneath his breath. “You’d think moving out to the country would mean less corporate fuckery.”

“’Bout as new as you are,” Miser mutters as he begins making change. “Brought a manager and her two brats here too.”

“That _wasn’t_ the manager?” CJ says.

“Representative. Some towns need…convincing.”

“Tradition and all,” Fergus agrees. “They didn’t need much convincing.”

Miser shrugs. “Fifty percent discount is a lot of money.”

“Good point.”

They take their purchases out. Cj is fuming.

“So…what?” she says. “They lose their store and everyone gets a shitty part-time at Joja that pays nickels and dimes?”

“Pretty much.”

“Can we _do_ something?”

He shrugs, more concerned securing their bag to the bike. She watches him, tapping her foot and glaring fiercely across the square.

“You know how we get Virinii to sell our stuff?” she suddenly says. “What if we did that for Estill’s and gave them a cut?”

His first instinct is no, because he wants the money for himself. He wants to not be poor for once in his life. But he knows that CJ’s much the same way, and he’s surprised that she would suggest that at all.

“We could talk about it,” he says. “Tonight, though.”

“Okay. What about the coupons? I guess we’ll throw them out.”

“No, wait.” Again, he’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Joja has to have stock that we’d normally go into the city for anyways, right?”

Her eyes widen with dawning realization. “Fergus, let’s get a lawn mower! Please? And a weed whacker! Fuck those scythes.”

God that sounds like a lot of money to spend. He looks at the coupon and—it’s today only, it looks like. Now or never. He huffs.

“Alright, but I have to go meet Jean.”

“Gimme your car?”

She grins. He scowls. He doesn’t want to go shopping later though, and if he can hand that entire task onto CJ for the low, low price of letting her drive his car…

He pulls out his keys, snapping them out of reach when she makes a grab for them. “A single scratch, CJ, and filler and a paint job is on your fucking dime.”

“Come on, I’m not that bad of a driver.”

“I don’t even know if you have a license.” But nonetheless, he gives her the keys. “As long as you know that you pay for your fuck ups, though.”

“Yes!” She fist pumps and darts out of reach, presumably thinking he’ll have last second regrets and snatch back her prize. “I’ll have it all done by the time you get home! Have fun!”

He waves her off. He doesn’t tell her to have fun in return because he thinks that means she’ll intentionally hurt his car.

Jean’s home isn’t that large, but like most of the homes around here it boasts a large front yard and a much, much, _much_ larger backyard. He takes in the faded blue siding and the dirty windows.

He hits the doorbell, and Jean answers very quickly, like she’s been waiting for him. “Fergus! Come in, I started some coffee already.”

“Oh, thanks.” He steps, but hovers by the door while she presses further in. “What did you need help with?”

She gives him a look. “Nothing, darling, I wanted to catch up. Why don’t you come into the kitchen?”

What? Like friends? He toes off his ratty sneakers (rattier for farm life, lord knows he should invest in boots) and navigates the maze of two couches and two armchairs, all arranged like that have frequent company, a goddamn social life. In his old apartment, they’d had one loveseat. He’d slept on it many times, and not just because of arguments.

He steps into the kitchen as Oann, who he assumes is Jean’s partner, comes inside. He’s followed by three big, eager dogs, and Fergus goes rigid.

A blond mutt catches sight of him and lunges forward, whining and tail wagging. Fergus jerks backwards so violently that he careens into a hapless houseplant and bangs a hip hard on the counter corner.

Oann catches it by the collar. “Whoa there, girlie.”

“Sorry,” Jean says, “she’s our newest and we’re still training her.”

Mind racing, Fergus barely hears her. The other two dogs are sniffing at his feet and legs and his only instinct is to either smash a plate or to get as far away from them as possible. He opts for the latter.

“YouknowwhatIjustrealizedIhavechores,” he says, the words spilling out of him in a single stream because he can’t afford to take breaths and make his escape any slower than it already is.

He’s made it out the door, not even stopping to put on his shoes but merely grabbing them on his way out, by the time Jean catches up to him.

“Fergus! Fergus, wait!” She gets around in front of him, the only way she could have stopped him. “What’s going on, darling? You’ve gone pale as a ghost.”

“I’m fine, it’s nothing, I’m fine.” He stumbles backwards and hastily gropes behind with his free hand until he can find his bike and sit on it before his legs give out beneath him. He’s very painfully obvious. But what does he prefer? Shaking hands and shallow breaths or the anger that has led to that cold silence between him and CJ?

He looks up at Jean through the hair that’s fallen across his face. She’s staring at him, then at the house, then she rubs the back of her neck.

“Sorry, darling,” she finally says. “I didn’t think—”

“What are you sorry about?” he snaps.

She winces. “Why don’t we walk along the river and catch up instead? Home’s a little messy anyways.”

He doesn’t want any of that. He thought he would be here for a quick, dog-free job and not a long, dog-filled social interaction. By no means is he mentally prepared for even something as simple as a riverside walk, especially with someone who’s all but a total stranger to him.

“I, I don’t know, Jean,” he says. “I’m…”

“Please?” she says. “You know I’ve missed you. We had a lot of fun back when you used to come out here. I wanna know what you’ve been up to.”

“I haven’t been up to…anything?” He laughs, but it’s more pitiful than anything. There’s something about Jean, though, something that has the rest of it come pouring out of him and suddenly he can’t stop. “I haven’t done anything with my life. That’s why I’m out here, because nothing happened! I lived in the city with a shitty job and a shitty girlfriend and shitty family and—I didn’t do anything. I didn’t go to school even.

“Instead I bounced from job to job because I have a temper and ended up a fucking pencil pusher until I blew up on my manager and got fired, blew up on my girlfriend and got broken up with, and then happened to remembered that I inherited a farm except apparently it’s only half a damn farm and I was supposed to split it with my sister who I didn’t learn was dead until her fucking _daughter_ walks in waving around _her_ letter saying she owns the farm too out of some contrived fucking attempt by my dead father to make up play family again!

“So now I’m living with my niece and I’m not even sure if this is working out because we both inherited stubbornness on top of this fucking farm and I don’t even know how to act around her half the time because she’s a fucking adult but she’s supposed to be my niece and sometimes,” and he laughs again, a little hysterically this time, and reaches up to rub away the dampness around his eyes, “and sometimes she reminds me of her mother, and I guess I wish that it’d been her that walked in and that, that y’know, that we could’ve done what Dad wanted and made it work again.

“I’m sorry,” he ends with, failing too many time to rub away his tears and letting his hand fall into his lap. “It’s been a long time, we barely know each other, I shouldn’t—”

“No,” she interrupts. “No, Fergus, it’s okay. Why don’t we walk?”

He takes a deep breath, and manages a nod. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s walk.”

She lets him take his time putting his shoes on, dipping inside to let Oann know where they were going. For a while, the rushing water was the only sound. He let it be, watching the swollen river as it ran its path in the earth ever deeper, fattened by springtime rain and probably overflowing with fish.

“You look like you’ve been busy,” he finally says.

And she smiles. “As busy as you can in a small town. Took Pop’s old bar once I hit seventeen and cleaned ‘er up, made ‘er my own. Met Oann when they came cruising through for the Fair and two years and three dogs later we tied the knot.”

“Sounds simple.”

“Hard to be anything else in a place like this. It ain’t all been easy, but hell if I can say it’s been hard. I guess the hardest parts was watching everyone hightail it for city school and all. No one comes back, y’know?”

“I came back.”

“You did. Why you think I’m so damn happy to see you?”

That draws a more genuine smile out of him. “I wouldn’t think you’d remember me. I came here so sure that no one would realize who I was. Place got colourful while I was gone.”

“Not that I’ve seen?”

“No? The kiil’rah and the felic and the dragonkin are all normal?”

“Normal as normal can be.”

This is the exact same thing that CJ said when he brought it up to her, and like CJ he honestly cannot tell if Jean is fucking with him or not. He doesn’t like it.

“How’s farm life treating you?” she asks.

“I don’t hate it,” he admits. “It’s boring, mostly. I guess I got used to boring, though.”

“Boring? In the city?”

“I worked for Joja,” he says flatly. “They can make anything boring.”

She grimaces. “That doesn’t give me high hopes, you know. Estill’s already talked about how they keep underpricing her.”

“Oh you should have seen it. Their representative came into the store and waved around a pack of fifty percent off coupons to get everyone running over there instead.”

“Seriously? How do they afford that?”

“Sell at a loss,” he says, parroting what Miser said only because he actually hadn’t known this, “take the hit because they can handle it until they drive Estill’s out of business.”

“Damn brutal.”

“Yeah, you can say that again.” He huffs. “CJ suggested we start selling our veggies through her and give her a cut, just to help her out. I…I don’t know if I want to do that.”

“It’d certainly help them out. Estill likes to take some of their stock out to farmer’s markets sometimes—even if you just gave her part of what you grow, she could take it out there and make some to help stay afloat.”

Giving part of it didn’t sound like as bad an idea, actually. It definitely doesn’t give him the gut reaction that CJ’s suggestion did. Even if they gave Estill a couple bundles, they would still make enough from everything else to stay in the black.

“I’ll give that a thought. Thanks.”

“It’s a community, Fergus,” she says. “It’s all about working together.”

Nothing like the city. All competition, all cutthroat, where he always felt like he was falling behind. But again he feels lost, because he doesn’t know how to measure his progress out here. No promotions or pats on the back to tell him he’s doing a good job, just endless days stretching out before him, blending together with seemingly no beginning and no end.

He can’t pour out _everything_ to Jean, though, so he keeps those feelings bottled up. In fact he avoids talking as much about himself for most of the walk, letting loose only the innocent thoughts, the light ones. It felt nice in the moment to tell Jean all the things that nibbled on his soul, but now all he feels is sour regret.

Regret or not, though, he feels leagues better by the time they’re back in front of her house.

“Alright, I should help Oann at the saloon,” she says, “but we should do this again. Could always use more friends.”

He blinks owlishly at her. “Uh…yeah. Yeah, definitely. I’ll, uh…maybe I’ll show you where we caught that stupid catfish.”

She barked out a hearty laugh. “I’m telling you, darling, next time you wanna go wrangling one of those fuckers you need to bring me! It sounds like a helluva time!”

“We’ll see if you’ll still be thinking that when it launches you flat on your ass.”

“It sure can try!”

They laugh and say goodbye, and he goes home feeling light. Lighter yet when he sees his car is in one piece, and CJ has spent her time fighting back some of the long grass with their new weedwhacker.

“Hey, Fergus! Lookit how much faster this thing is!” she exclaims, sweeping the machine and cutting away a swath of grass. “You have fun with Jean?”

“It was fine. We should plant these seeds, though. Actually,” he says, speaking over the bubbling protest on her tongue, “you’ve been working the whole time I was gone. I can do it. It won’t take long.”

“Oh. I’m gonna keep cutting grass, then, I’m having fun.”

“Then I’ll cook afterwards too. Deal?”

She grins. “Deal.”


	6. The One That Maeve’s In

“Salmonberry jam isn’t that great.”

“No, but you find the damn things everywhere. Why would it be good?”

“I don’t know,” CJ says around a mouthful of toast. “You gave some to Jean and I thought you liked her? So I guess I thought it’d be _good.”_

“Yeah, well, at least I’m not trying to make _wine_ with it,” Fergus retorts, snatching up her plate to rinse in the sink.

Summer’s a month away. They’ve been here two months and they’ve made a routine of it. He farms, and cleans, and he visits Jean, he tries to draw and seems to fail every time. He continues to avoid town, but CJ is there practically every night with some friend or another, or down at the saloon. These days she talks about inviting people over. He doesn’t like the idea at all.

He’s a bit bored. But it’s nothing like the city, and it keeps being nothing like the city. He doesn’t mind it. CJ definitely doesn’t.

While CJ finishes eating, he steps out, wincing at the fields awaiting their attention. The other day Petrisse visited, making mention of a sprinkler system that could do wonders for their work load, which now has them spending several hours every morning making sure everything is watered. That means money, though, and even though they’re making more of it, he’s not ready to drop a whole lot of it on a sprinkler system.

Petrisse mentioned offhand that she could set it up herself in exchange for resources, but the way she said it implied that she wanted a little more than a bit of hardwood for it. He doesn’t have that. Not yet at least.

“Hey, did I show you what I found yesterday?” CJ says as she comes out to join him.

“No, you didn’t.”

She leads him away from the farmhouse, past a small lumber pile where he’s spent too many hours venting frustrations by chopping wood. Admittedly, he sometimes fantasizes about his ex seeing him do it shirtless. As if it’ll fix things. As if he wants things to be fixed.

“Oh, yeah, the old coop,” he says as she leads him up to a small building. Tucked away in the thickest trees and part ways up the slope, it’s not visible from the house. “We used to have nearly a dozen chickens here. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen your cousin chased across the yard by an angry rooster.”

She laughs. “They were afraid of a _rooster?”_

“Oh no, this thing was absolutely vicious. It gave him a pretty gnarly scar on his head when it nearly pecked out his eye. We ended up eating the stringy fuck.”

She snorts with delight. “We should totally fix this up and get chickens! Maybe no roosters, though.”

“No, not a good idea. We’ll talk to Petrisse about repairs, though. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind helping.”

“Exactly!”

They walk back, shooting back and forth ideas for other fixer upper jobs around the farm. As they finish their short walk, Good Boy trots up to them.

He doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination _like_ Good Boy, but a few days ago, after plenty of time letting himself learn to relax around the old dog, he told CJ that she could let him off the leash. He isn’t allowed in the house, though. Not yet, but he figures he can get to that point eventually.

Right now, though, he’s content to ignore Good Boy, and Good Boy is content to get all his loving from CJ, who greets him with a good ear ruffle and enthusiastic praise.

“We should get a cat,” he comments as he walks over to the mailbox. “If we’re going to start storing feed for chickens, we’re going to have mice.”

“You like cats?” she says, eyebrows raising.

He flips through the mail, grimacing at bills, minor though they are. “I don’t like any animals. Cats are useful, though.”

“Well good news! Maeve’s cat just had kittens! I bet she’ll let us have one of them!”

He’s heard that name, but he’s never met her. “We can do that then.”

“Maybe she’ll let us have _two_ of them?”

“Let’s not get crazy here.” He pauses in his mail sorting and passes her a letter. “For you.”

“What? Why for me?” But the moment she lays eyes on it, her face falls. “Oh.”

“Secret admirer?” he says jokingly.

“No, my dad.”

His turn for his expression to sour. He turns away so she can’t see it. “Yeah? And what’s he got to say?” He has to bite down on tagging a sarcastic comment onto the end of that.

“Iunno. I’ll read it later. I’m gonna text Maeve and ask if we can go over after chores, that okay?”

“Mmhm.”

They finish chores and opt for lunch before heading down to see Maeve, who is apparently Jean’s neighbour. Probably where he heard the name from.

Doing his best to ignore the chills that Jean’s noisy dogs send up his spine, he follows CJ inside.

He has a quick distraction because it’s noisy inside, too. He braces himself to have walked in on an argument, but he quickly realizes that it’s nothing but delighted laughter. The teen he’d met with Skylar, Katherine, was buckled over laughing while the woman he assumed was her mother, and Maeve, was offering her back her phone with a look of mock exasperation on her face.

“Why do you show me this shit?” she says. “’Fleshy soda can?’ You’re something else.”

“But the look on your face, Ma!” Katherine wheezes.

“Take your phone. I don’t want to be within a mile of something tainted by that.”

Maeve looks a lot like Katherine, the same brown eyes and the same hooked nose. Her black hair is much longer though, sweeping away from her face in airy layers that fall past her shoulders. And she’s tall—somewhere around Jean’s height. What is with this town and everyone being above average in height?

“You’re the guy with the motorcycle!” Katherine belts out, the first to notice them. “Can you take me on a ride? Please?”

“I don’t think so,” Maeve interjects, shooting him a knowing smile. Okay, he likes this one. “You came looking for the kittens, innt that right?”

“Yes!” CJ answers, and immediately launches into a spiel about getting chickens and needing feed that Fergus instantly tunes out while Maeve leads them into the other room.

He never had pets growing up, the closest being the half-feral barn cats that had hung around the farm when he was younger. He remembers being young enough to _pretend_ to be a cat, going through a phase of hissing at his sister and cousins when they upset him. Thank god he’s not seven anymore.

Maeve’s cat is an elegant molly, though, black with flecks of ginger sprinkling her flank like splattered paint. The kittens are playing overtop their exhausted mother, one pure black, one a matching tortoiseshell like her mother, and one ginger and white.

“There won’t be too much love loss for Merga,” Maeve remarks. “I think she’s getting tired of them.”

“I can see why,” Fergus comments.

“Well?” CJ prompts. “Which one do you want?”

“You can pick.”

“I picked the dog, you picked the cat.”

He shoots Maeve who, despite not having shared a word with him, seems like his only ally. She smiles and motions for him to choose.

“Do they have names?” he says.

“Nope. That’s how you get attached,” Maeve says. “The black and the ginger one are boys, though, and the tortoiseshell is a girl.”

“Oh. I don’t know. The black one, I guess.”

“Of course you choose the black one,” CJ says.

“Why of course?”

“Black car? Black motorcycle? Were you _goth_?”

“Goth would imply I ever cared enough to have a sense of fashion.”

“Okay, true. So name him.”

“Uh…”

“You have a bit,” Maeve intercepts, saving him again. “They’ll be ready to go to their new homes in a couple weeks. If you two want to stick around and play with them, though, be my guest. Katherine shouldn’t bug you. She needs to do homework.”

“Aw, Ma, come on!” she protests from the other room.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten, Kat. Get ‘er done already.”

CJ hardly needs an invitation to get on the floor and grab the nearest cat toy for the kittens to chase. Fergus stays standing, though. It’s just a barn cat. He doesn’t intend to play with it once they own it, and he doesn’t intend to play with it now.

“So you’re the Fergus I’ve been hearing about ‘round town,” Maeve says, sticking around to keep him company.

He grimaces. “I hope that doesn’t mean everyone’s talking about me.”

“Obviously you’ve never lived in a small town. You can’t show up, all tall, dark, handsome, and brooding, and not expect attention.”

“Trust me, I’m not nearly that interesting.”

She laughs. “You only need to be a little interesting, trust me. We’re all _dying_ for interesting ‘round here.”

“You’re going to be disappointed, then.”

“Motorcycle says otherwise.”

“My interesting begins and ends at the damn motorcycle,” he retorts. “You can tell them I’m just some city asshole who doesn’t know a damn thing about farming but is too stubborn to give up on it.”

“Maybe I should stop telling you you’re interesting and finally get the scoop. What makes a man move from the city to here anyways?”

He expects his entire self to recoil from sudden prying, but it’s said so lightly and unintrusively that the answer comes out of him, just as easy and lighthearted: “A man with nothing left to lose except a whole ass farm he didn’t ask for. I swear there’s no mystery to it. I’m just down on my luck and this is Plan Z.”

“Well I hope you don’t keep thinking you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here,” she says. “The town’s a beauty in it’s own damn right.”

“I can’t argue with that. I’m just trying to figure out what people _do_ here. Or…more like what I’m supposed to do here.”

“Any number of things. Reading, fishing, drinking, building, exploring. Give it time and you’ll figure it out.”

“Hopefully. What do you do then? Can’t be too many jobs here.”

“There isn’t. I work in the city. Tattoo artist.”

He’s not ready for her to push up her sleeve to reveal, well, another sleeve, this one extensive and colourful, artwork of planets and nebulas and plants and flowers in bold rainbows and more, he suspects, beneath the rest of her shirt. He scrubs his eyes, chasing away those thoughts. She has a kid—so she’s married, right?

“Does that means all the art’s yours?” he asks, gesturing to the many paintings around them, many of animals captured with remarkable detail, yet still toeing a hint of surrealism.

“Some. I try to be a little humble.”

“Why bother? They’re good. You really know how to capture the energy and movement of the subject, especially with the owls.”

He nods towards one in particular, a barn owl mid-dive with its magnificent wings crooked backwards and its talons extended. Snow sprays up and around it, bleeding into its moon shade underbelly in a dream-like blur. He could almost see it moving, but the picture is very much static.

“You sound like an artist yourself,” she says.

“No,” he says, a little too quickly. “I mean—I used to be. I haven’t drawn in years.”

“No? Well if you ever want to try again, come over. I’ve got enough to help break an artist’s block. Promise.”

His chest swells with an unexpected warmth. For the first time in years, he wants to grab a pen, a brush, a pencil, _something_ , and draw…he doesn’t know. Anything. A tree, teeth in the dark, a monster lurking, something. He hopes that feeling sticks around until he’s home.

Maeve leaves, promising to come back with drinks, and Fergus watches CJ play with the kittens, like June had often done when they were young. Like he’d done too. With a quiet sigh, he lowers himself onto the floor beside CJ to wiggle a loose feather for the black kitten to chase in dizzying circles.

They leave and opt for an early supper at the saloon before heading home. Just as well, the air is heavy with oncoming rain. When they get back to the farm, fat droplets have begun to fall and the wind’s picked up, whistling against the old home while they shake out their sweaters on the porch.

“So you think of a name?” CJ asks.

She’s determined to make him name the thing. He sighs through his nose, staring out across the farm.

“Cadaver,” he says.

“What? Why _Cadaver?”_

“Your mother named the old tom who used to come by here when we were young Cadaver. He smelled like death and his ears and tail tip fell off one winter because of frostbite, but he kept going for nearly the entire time we were allowed to come here.”

She gives a half-laugh. “He sounds like the worst cat ever.”

“Say all you want but that old fuck could not be killed. Not for a lack of trying. One time he came home half-dead from a fight with a fox or a coyote or something and walked it off a week later. When June found him though she thought he was dead, but when he slept, he’d be so out of it that you could pick him up and move him around and do anything you wanted to him and he wouldn’t wake up. He loved her to death, too. Slept with her every night.”

“Okay _that_ part is cute.”

“Mmhm.”

They pause when the wind picks up, gusting louder and stronger than before. Fergus nearly suggests going back inside, when he swears he hears his name on the wind and perks up. There’s no one on the farm, though. And who would be calling him?

He wants to ask CJ if she heard anything, but she looks like she’s in a whole other world.

“I think I’m going back into town,” she says abruptly. “See you later.”

Flipping up her hood, she runs into the rain and up the road. The wind continues to howl long after he watches her disappear up the hill. It tugs at him, almost pushing him to follow.

With a shake of his head, he heads inside.


	7. The Flower Festival Where Fergus's Issues With Authority Almost Come to a Head and Also The Guys(TM) are There

“So don’t be mad.”

Fergus sighs. “I’m already mad.”

CJ just grins, like this is a point of pride for her. “Virinii asked me if we could grow flowers for the Flower Festival and I said yes.” She brandishes a small box packed to the brim with packets of seeds. “We’re gonna make _bank_ though!”

He grimaces—not because they’re growing _more_ crops, but because they’re going to be breaking their backs making enough room for said crops. But he sighs and nods.

“Can’t say no to money.”

That conversation happened nearly three weeks ago. Today’s the long awaited Flower Festival, and Fergus has been awake since the ungodly hour of four in the morning. And it’s not like he isn’t a morning person—six AM comes easily to him. Four AM is an entirely different beast, and if this Flower Festival or whatever the fuck isn’t the most beautiful, tear-jerking, heavenly goddamn thing he’s ever seen he may as well torch it himself just to get the tiniest bit of satisfaction from all the work he’s been roped into doing for it.

CJ might be right here with him if it wasn’t for the fact that she seems to revel in watching him get closer and closer to his boiling point. He wants to tell her that she should have been around for his days in retail, if she thinks seeing him angry is such a fucking delight.

Worst of all, though, is Virinii, who has a taste for perfection and is far too at ease with ordering them around. Lervaela is here as well and she’s just about the only thing stopping him from telling Virinii where she could put these flowers herself. She only does so much, though. His anger is starting to displace on her now too.

And then, just as he’s promising himself that the next time Virinii steps on his toes that he’s going to say something, just as he tells himself that this is it, this is his breaking point and he wants nothing more than one last excuse to explode, it’s done.

“Wow, we did a great fucking job,” CJ says.

He begrudgingly glares at the displays and decorations, not wanting to agree but physically unable to disagree because she’s right. This is nothing like the festivals that have on occasion made their way into city life, no grand sculptures bristling with rainbow petals and perfectly manicured leaves, not a spot nor wilt in sight, but he decides that maybe it’s actually better. That maybe the beauty lies in the imperfections.

He especially appreciates the long streams of fabric casting shade across the ground, thin enough to splay their patterns over neat cropped grass and thick enough to provide a safe haven from the sun as its well on its way to its zenith.

He sits beneath a crowd of them now, damp all over with the sweat of over four hours of nonstop labour and in such desperate need of a shower that he contemplates wading into the sea. He dissuades himself of that. The salt lick of the ocean may be cooler, but it’ll do him no better than sweat.

“I’d like it more if I had time to go home and shower,” he says. “Or if we could have set this up yesterday like sensible people.”

“I don’t think flowers keep that long.”

He doesn’t know enough about flowers to dispute that. He feels like he should, though. Maybe it’s about time he goes to the goddamn library, or does research on the internet.

Nine o clock rolls around and the town finally starts appearing. Jean and Oann are first along with Skylar, who helps them set up the food on the table he specifically remembers Virinii telling him to do over twice. It’s nice to know that they probably weren’t the only ones awake since four in the morning to make this happen.

A young woman and two of the older members of the town, all human, showed next, and that’s when CJ begins making her usual social rounds. Fergus instead snatches up a nearby chair to watch people filter in, silently testing himself on names and faces. He doesn’t do well.

Max, the town doctor, shows up next, cane in hand. Maeve has been here setting up, but Katherine and Ken, the young man staying in Maeve’s extra bedroom, arrive after Max, ribbing each other the entire way.

It’s not until Josan and Tam show up around nine thirty that he finally heaves himself out of the chair to join them by the waterside. Besides Jean, he’s found himself going down to the beach and it seems natural to catch Josan and talk. He spends more time fishing with him than he cares to admit, if only because he knows that CJ will accuse him of truly being old.

Josan catches sight of him and smirks. “Early mornin’, mate? You look like right ‘ell.”

“Like I need you to tell me. At least tell me I did a good job.”

Josan does him the favour of a brief glance around, but ends up shrugging anyways. “Sorry. No eye for beauty ‘ere.”

“Ass.”

“Sure, sure.” He pulls out a cigarette and lights it up. “Smoke?”

“Why do you always ask?” he says tiredly.

“Because you always look so damn ‘ungry when I pull one out.”

“It’s called being a recovering addict.”

“Never ‘eard of it.” He blows out a stream of smoke, but has the courtesy to aim it away from Fergus before moving downwind of him. “I’ll stop asking, then. Lemme tell you ‘bout this asshole of an ‘alibut I caught the other day.”

He’s almost embarrassed to sit around listening to goddamn fishing stories, but Josan doesn’t make it boring at least and they soon move on to other topics of various nothing. Tam, who Fergus doesn’t speak with nearly as much, chimes in with the occasional comment, more content to sun himself and stare off across the water.

“’Ey there boys!” They all glance up as Roy saunters over. Across the clearing, Virinii has her golden eyes on him. None of the other felic seem to be here. “Nice flowers, Fergus, I hear you set ‘em up? Good on ya. Josan, listen, when’s next poker night ‘cus I got wine that’s gonna rock your goddamn world, fresh outta the barrel courtesy of lovely Ms. Jean after we patched up that window o’ hers.”

“Wine drunk on poker night eh?” Josan snorts and fixes his glasses. “You remember the last time that ‘appened, mate? You still got that scar.”

“An’ I’ll let ya gimme another, but trust me, Josan, you ain’t gonna be fightin’ when you got this stuff in you I swear.”

“And what’m I gonna be doing? Loving?”

Roy cracks a nasty, crooked grin. “A’ight, maybe a lil’ fightin’, but only cus I know that’s how you like it, Jos.”

“What wine are you drinking that’s making you fight?” Fergus says in disbelief.

“It ain’t the wine,” Tam drawls. “Just a pretty dressed up excuse to fight ‘n kiss.”

“Oh you’d love it,” Roy says emphatically. “And we can always use another player, if you’re the gamblin’ type. What’cha say, Ferg, one run ‘round the table and see how you shape up?”

“You say that like I have anything to bet,” he retorts.

“Got that pretty lil’ bike o’ yours.” Fergus gives him a vicious look that has him shrugging and laughing. “You’re a farmer, bud, I ain’t gonna say no to a free batch of fresh veggies; it gets expensive! Look, you don’t even gotta bet. Lord knows Ferro ain’t got a risk-taking bone in his body, he just comes ‘round for the free drink.”

“And free entertainment,” Tam inputs. “C’mon, give it a try. Sit and watch da first and den if’n you t’ink you’re wanting to try your hand and play a lil’ card, den no problem.”

He’s now got all three looking expectantly at him, so he huffs. “I’ll try it,” he says. “But I don’t think I’m going to bet. I’m still getting used to not being dirt fucking poor.”

“New player!” Roy yells. “That’a boy! Right, Jos, gimme the night, gimme the hour, I’m dying for a stab at’cha.”

Josan gives him a date and then follows him to go tell who Fergus presumes are the other players. Tam moves on as well, leaving Fergus to stand alone by the waters, wishing he had a smoke if only to occupy his hands.

Instead he gets a different and markedly worse distraction.

“Fergus, marvelous work with the displays.” He stifles an annoyed huff as Edric familiar growl curls down his spine. He’s done a good enough job of avoiding him, but it was inevitably that he’d show up here. “Terribly sorry that you must have dealt with my mother’s tragic eye for perfection.”

“Your mother’s lucky I didn’t bite her head off,” he retorts, lolling his head upwards to give him a withering look.

Edric’s eyes crinkle with an amused smile. “Perhaps it’s good you didn’t. Or perhaps you should have. What could she do to the local farmer? Certainly not drive him out of town—you’re about the only thing keeping it afloat.”

He wants to ask how the hell he’s doing that, but Edric takes him around the shoulder and begins to lead him back towards the busier parts of the festival. “There’s someone I want you to meet. I don’t think you and my brother are acquainted, but I think the two of you will enjoy each other’s company.”

“What about me standing over here by myself screamed ‘I want to meet new people?’”

Edric laughs. “I doubt you’ve wanted to meet any of the folk you’ve encountered in Pelican Town. Good things have come of it anyways, though, have they not?”

“You should know that being right doesn’t suit you.”

“Oh? And it suits you more?”

If he thought Rivah looked like Lervaela, Edric’s brother looks like a carbon copy. White furred and blue eyed, with a gorgeous, curly mane pulled partly into a neat bun before tumbling all the way down his back. He’s seated in one of the chairs, well absorbed in the book in his hands. He doesn’t acknowledge them walking up.

“A book, Edric, indicates that I do not want to talk,” he says before his brother can say a word.

“Show a little hospitality, Allerick, I wanted to introduce the new farmer to you.”

They say each others’ names like insults, slippery and venomous barely covered with a dusting of sugar sweetness, and regard each other like war generals on either side of a border, daring the other to over step. He knows what it’s like to not like family, but at least his family had the courtesy of being open and vocal about their distaste. This is something else entirely, a dislike that he can’t quite put his finger on.

Makes him wonder why Edric would deem to introduce them at all.

Exhaling through his nose, Allerick pulls a hairstick out of his bun to use as a bookmark before folding it neatly into his lap. It looks like a rather dense text about felic culture, of all things. He can only judge that by the one word on the cover he can understand, though. The rest is written in French.

“You must be Fergus,” Allerick says. “I’ve met your companion, quite the energetic thing she is. Keen, though, I will give her that. My name’s Allerick; I run the library and museum, which sadly is situated next to the smithy and far more fire than I am comfortable with seeing in the hands of my brother.”

Edric sniffs indignantly. “I haven’t burned down your building yet.”

“The key word is yet.”

“Only because I have second thoughts about letting it stand some days.”

“And it’s that sort of childishness that makes me wary about having you be my neighbour.”

“So is this an introduction or an excuse to argue?” Fergus interjects, folding his arms. “Because I think I’m going to go sit down.”

“You should,” Allerick says before Edric can speak. “But do come by the library sometime and I’ll introduce myself properly, without my brother overseeing like an overeager parent trying to set up a playdate.”

He knows this code, actually, and the code is “I would rather mentally prepare myself for an introduction without my shitty brother breathing down my neck.” He wholeheartedly agrees. After bidding a quick goodbye, he walks away, intending to find CJ. Unfortunately, Edric follows him.

“You’ll see plenty of him during the dance,” he says. “Are you staying that long?”

“You seem a little too keen to get us to talk.”

“The both of you need more friends.”

“Really? Because you talk to him like you hate him. Doesn’t sound like you care how many friends he has.”

“I care more about the friends you have. What can I say, Fergus, I’m fond of you.”

He sneers. “The feeling’s not mutual.”

A deep chuckle rumbles in Edric’s chest. “You can’t scare me off that easily. I’ll see you around, Fergus. Enjoy the festival.”

Finally free, he heads to where CJ has draped herself over a chair, looking half dead. He hopes that means that she won’t bother him about Edric. A hope’s only a hope, though.

“Spending time with Edric, huh?” she says, cracking open an eye.

“I wouldn’t calling it spending time with him,” he says as he collapses into the chair beside her. “More like being held hostage.”

She snorts a laugh. “Better you than me.”

“Oh shut up.”

He half dozes through most of the festival. By noon the clearing is bustling with people, and a lot of them walk up to him and CJ to praise them for growing such a lovely crop for this year’s festivities. Some of them don’t even seem to be from this town, and after the first few he soon has no idea who he’s talking to. CJ fields most of the social interaction, fortunately.

He doesn’t sleep through Allerick’s performance, though. Most because he can’t believe anyone would swing swords around the way he does. Allerick does it with such cool confidence, though, and earns the applause he gets afterwards.

“Okay, that was cool,” CJ comments. “Allerick’s the coolest Velns sibling, I think.”

“Haven’t really met him.”

“You should. You’d probably get along with him. You’re both huge fucking introverts,” she laughs.

By two o clock, clouds have begun to roll in and there’s a certain haste as everyone tries to finish up before the incoming rain. Virinii drops by to assure him and CJ that they can leave whenever they want—she would manage the cleanup. He’s never been more thankful for anything in his entire life. The last thing he wants is to be disassembling the festival in the rain.

At exactly three fifthy-six, a wall of rain sweeps across the ocean waves and hits the clearing like a truck, which is his cue to run back to his bike with CJ and head home.

“Should’ve driven the car,” CJ grumbles as they run from the bike to the porch.

“Did you see how many potholes that road had? She’d never have survived. It’s not like I thought it’d start raining anyways.”

Thundering, in fact, as the sky lights up above them, followed swiftly by a loud crack. The rain seems to come down even harder and the wind picks up, sending a wicked chill back his spine all the way to the tips of his toes. It feels like it’s tugging him to head back out, but he resists the urge and steps back towards the door.

“I’m going to go shower,” he says to CJ, who seems transfixed by the storm. She waves absently.

When he comes out of the bathroom, CJ hasn’t come inside. Towel around his waist, he peers outside, expecting to see her on the porch. No such luck.

“CJ?!” he yells into the house, then waits for an annoyed “WHAT?!” in return. Nothing. He gets dressed, assuming she’s out with Good Boy and will be inside soon.

She isn’t. He check outside, storm still raging, and Good Boy is in his dog house safe and sound, no CJ to be seen. He doesn’t want to feel worried, but usually CJ will drop a hurried “going to town” before disappearing on him. He texts her, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

He ends up on the porch, shifting his weight from foot to foot. The wind is so strong that it occasionally gusts droplets of water on him. Again, it pulls him out to the road.

Thunder cracks up above and finally he decides to listen. He steps off the porch and takes off in a sprint up the road.


	8. Fergus Learns Some Things About the World That He Frankly Didn’t Need or Want to Know and He’s Really Upset About It

He’s got water streaming down his face in rivulets and he’s never felt so badly like he’s drowning, not since…well, he’s a bit busy confronting his fear of dogs to get into that.

The town is abandoned, the only sign of life being the light on in front of the clinic which flickers when the thunder splits the sky above his head. Lightning follows so quickly that he was certain that if it weren’t for the rain, he might have heard it make contact with the ground somewhere. Wherever that may be, he hopes the rain is heavy enough to put out the fires.

He takes the stairs up the northern cliff by threes, nearly slipping both from his grip bare sneakers and from the waterfall of water streaming down it. How he made it to the top without cracking open his head was a mystery to him.

He hasn’t been up here since he was a kid. As he gazes over the town, he remembers being a kid and feeling like he was on top of the world. He also remembers pushing a cousin over the edge onto the roof of the clinic, prompting a hasty effort to put up the metal railing.

Probably for the best. The playground lies up here too, leaving plenty of opportunities for children at play to fling themselves accidentally off a cliff.

The playground and the cliff are the least of his concerns. He isn’t sure why he’s so driven, why’s he so completely certain that CJ is here, along this overgrown path he’s never seen before, but the storm is raging in his bones and driving him forward, no longer allowing him to refuse its pull.

At once, the undergrowth parts into a tiny clearing and a building. He has no idea how big it is for how thick the forest here is, but the big wooden door seems almost illuminated, perfectly visible in the storm dark evening and driving rain. He tries the knob, and that’s all it takes for the heavy thing to swing forward. Despite how dark it is inside, he steps in and lets the door shut behind him.

It’s like he’s been transported to another world.

His exhale comes out as a thick cloud of vapour, but it’s warm in here. There are holes in the roof, but through he sees not the storm but the vast night sky, twinkling, unaffected, and moonless, something more beautiful than the faded lights that could shine through the city smog.

The entire building is quite dilapidated. The floor boards creak and groan as he moves further into the room, taking in the shattered fish tank, the ruined carpeting, and the collapsed fireplace. Unlike the home left two years neglected, this place was as much man as it was nature. An entire tree had grown up through the floorboards in the center of the room, so thick and healthy that he questioned just how long this place had been left alone.

A strong wind blows through the building, chiming and jingling. Fergus blinks out of his stupor, catching himself staring at the tree. Slowly, he begins to walk around it. It’s hard to tear himself away, as if it wrapped its roots up and around him to prevent him leaving.

He walks down the hall, heart thumping in his chest. The chiming grows louder. He wants to call for CJ, but his throat has closed up.

She isn’t too far, though. He stops at the door at the end of the hall, where a soft golden light casts a shadow across the floor, and there she is, calm as can be as she stands before a golden plaque on the far wall.

He steps inside, making her jump. At once, the magic of the old building is lost. What he thought had been a golden glowing plaque is nothing more than a tarnished engraving. There are no wind chimes, no stirring breeze. He can hear the pounding rain and the terrible thunder and all the ways that the building sways and groans, beaten and battered by the storm in a way that makes him want to get out of here as soon as possible.

Shaking off what he could only explain as exhaustion making him see and hear things, annoyance comes pouring out of him with ease: “CJ, what the hell are you doing in here? You can’t just run off during a storm this bad and not at least tell me what you’re doing. This place sounds like it’s about to fucking collapse!”

It takes her a second to gather her wits, glancing at the plaque and then back at him. “How… How’d you know I was here?”

He opens his mouth to tell her but, well, nothing comes out. He doesn’t know. Before now, he hadn’t even known this place existed, whatever it was.

“Does it matter?” he says instead. “I’m tired. I want to go home. What are you even doing here?”

“Iunno, just felt right to come here.”

“Well next time your ass feels right to come here, try shooting off a fucking text. I’d like to avoid running out in the pouring ass rain next time.”

He leaves the room and thank god she follows. Whatever driven that had carried him all the way to this place was long gone and he felt like he could barely stand. He just doesn’t have it in him to fight her.

“Doesn’t this place seem off to you?” CJ says as they enter into the main room.

“It feels like it’s going to bury us in rubble, if that’s what you mean,” he retorts.

“Fergus, there’s no way you would have known how to get to this place,” she said. “It called you, didn’t it?”

“Called me?” He laughs in disbelief. “Like on my phone that probably doesn’t work now because I was out in the rain with it?”

“You’re being dense on purpose!” she snaps. “There’s something about this place—and it’s not because it’s going to collapse!”

He shoots her an irritated look, and then at the tree growing in the middle of the room. Rain is streaming down the trunk and seeping into the cracks in the floorboards, and he imagines the decades of rot and sea salt decay that this place would have endured to have been abandoned long enough for a tree this big to grow through it. With a stab of fear, he grabs CJ and starts dragging her towards the door.

“Then obviously you don’t know shit about buildings!” he retorts.

“Fergus, for fuck’s sake, just trust me!”

“I’m not going to trust an insane person who ran off in the middle of a thunderstorm to come to some shit building in the middle of the woods that some bears probably live in!”

“Well you’re the insane person who ran out to find me!”

“THEN I’M SORRY FOR CARING!” he yells, all but throwing her out the front door.

But when he follows her outside to watch her catch herself on a tree, the rain is gone. He shoots a baffled look at his surroundings, as well, because the building isn’t in the thick of the woods anymore, just some imposing door in the middle of nowhere. He turns to the building, to the old clock face set high about the front door, to the broad windows on the sides and the walls overgrown with vines, and then back to CJ and the path out of the woods.

“Wait,” he says. “I know this place.”

And then he notices CJ rubbing her wrist, shooting him a glare that could kill, and he feels a stab of guilt and dismay. “Shit. I’m sorry, CJ, I just—with the storm and—do you know how _old_ this place is? It’s going to collapse any second now this community center hasn’t been in use since my _dad_ was a kid. It wasn’t safe.” She’s still glaring at him. “I’m _sorry_ —”

She huffs and lets her arm drop to her side. “It’s fine,” she says. “I was pretty freaked out the first time I came here too. Guess I shouldn’t blame you for that.”

“What? Why would you come _here?_ How many times have you been here?”

“Just once,” she replies. “I’ve only ever felt like…the _need_ to come here when it’s storming out, I guess.”

He shakes his head and rubs his eyes. “That doesn’t explain why.”

“I don’t _know_ why. C’mon, I know you felt it too! It was like the wind was telling you come here, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, what, like _magic_?” he sneers.

“I mean we do have a wizard in the valley…” she mutters beneath her breath.

“I’m sorry a _what_.”

She rolls her eyes. “Never mind, Fergus! Ugh, I can tell you’re going to be completely fucking impossible. I bet magic could hit you in the face and you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Well sorry for being a grown ass man who doesn’t believe in goddamn fairy tales.”

She starts down the path, and with one last—almost reluctant—look at the community center, he follows her. The rain has truly stopped, and there’s almost no sign of it ever being there to begin with. The skies are clear. The ground firm. Even the vegetation isn’t wet. He gets another chill.

“It’s just an old abandoned building,” he says. “Trust me when I say there’s plenty of other _safer_ places to do some goddamn ghost hunting.”

“It’s not ghosts.”

“Sorry, magic hunting. Whatever the hell.”

“You said it’s a community center?”

“Yeah,” he says, giving a suspicious look for the sudden topic shift. “Like I said, it fell out of use when your grandfather was still a kid. Something like fifty years ago.”

“Maybe exactly fifty years ago?”

“I’m not a fucking historian.” She looks at him for that one, but he doesn’t apologize this time what with her fraying his nerves. “There’s nothing special about it. The opposite, if anything. It used to be a place for the local towns to get together. Though it was functionally as much a town hall as it was a community center.”

“But that seems pretty important. Why would anyone stop using it?”

“I don’t know. The towns got smaller because the cities got bigger. Everyone wanted to get out of here for school and work, and no one came back. It’s still like that.”

“Well you came back,” she points out.

“And?”

“Iunno. Makes me think that the community centre could be worthwhile, y’know? Especially now that Joja’s here, it’d be a really good place for a farmer’s market that isn’t a billion miles away and costs a small fortune to drive to and it could make the towns around here more connected and stuff.”

“I…sure? What the hell are we going to do about it?”

A light comes on in her eyes. “We could fix it.”

He doesn’t like where this is going. “Good luck with that. You wanna start with the big damn tree in the middle of it?”

“Wow, show a little creativity. We could totally build around the tree, that’d look so cool!” She’s grinning now, possessed by her enthusiasm. “We have so many trees on our land, we could totally use the wood to fix it up, get some tips from Petrisse, and if we really start making money we could—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Since when is there a ‘we’?”

She looks crestfallen, but only for a second. “Come on, like you’re doing anything.”

“It’s not that I’m not doing anything it’s that I don’t know if I want to spend money on something like this. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m pretty fucking used to being poor as shit. I don’t need to be poor as shit again.”

“You’re not fucking special!” she snaps. “I was poor too, and even if I wasn’t I’m not _stupid_. I’d never spend so much money on it that we couldn’t support ourselves. We’re already starting to have more money than we need, and we’ve barely cleared a quarter of the farm!”

“That money needs to go towards fixing the farm, CJ,” he stresses. “I’m not saying the idea of fixing the community centre isn’t nice, but we’re not overflowing with cash, we’ve just been lazy about spending it on repairs now that we’ve got enough haphazard bullshit keeping us afloat.”

At that, he knows he has her because she sighs. “Yeah, okay. You’re right. But like…we have the wood on our land for free. We can at least do that for cheap.”

“It’s not that simple, okay? We don’t have anything to mill the wood with,” he says. “Look…this isn’t plausible right now. We have more important priorities. But we’ll…” and he sighs, “we’ll circle back to this, okay? I wouldn’t mind fixing it up. It could really help the town.”

He thought he said that because he didn’t want her to look so downtrodden. As the words leave his mouth, though, he realizes that he really _wouldn’t_ mind fixing up the community centre. But the issue of money breathes down his neck like a rabid wolf. It’s been three months—not nearly long enough to start convincing him that money is suddenly not a problem.

The compromise at least seems to placate CJ. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll probably still go there.”

As much as he wants to protest, he counts himself lucky to have won this much of the fight. “If you get crushed by a collapsing building, I’m not going to your funeral.”

She sticks out her tongue. “I bet you’d make it a bummer anyways, fucking killjoy.”

He hides his amused smirk with a roll of his eyes. “And by the way, I actually am sorry I was so rough with you. I really didn’t like the sound of that place. You had to hear how badly it was creaking from the wind.”

“Oh my god we did this already. It’s a rickety old building and you’re a stupid scaredy cat who spooks at the tiniest little creak, I get it.”

“I don’t know why the fuck I bother.”

But he does feel forgiven, because she continues to poke fun at him for the rest of the walk down the path. Finally they get off the path and back out into the open grass above the town. Worryingly, the sky is clear, not a cloud in sight as the sun begins to set far in the west. There isn’t the slightest breeze even.

“I’m not crazy, right?” he says to CJ. “It was storming like a motherfucker just before we came outside.”

She glances up at the sky and then shrugs. “Happened last time too,” she says dismissively, heading back down the stairs.

He frowns at the heavens one last time, and then shoots a look back at the path in the woods. He has to do a double take, though.

The path is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all I have for chapters for this fic unfortunately ;; Either skellie or I might write more in the future but that's a big if. I just wanted to get this on ao3 for funzies. Thanks for reading!


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